Finding My Way: Reflections on South African Literature [1 ed.] 1032633816, 9781032633817

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2  Duncan Brown 

Finding My Way 1 

FINDING  MY WAY

Finding My Way 3 

FINDING  MY WAY Reflections on South African Literature

Duncan Brown

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Duncan Brown The right of Duncan Brown to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Print editions not for sale in Sub-Saharan Africa British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781032633817 (hbk) ISBN: 9781032633824 (pbk) ISBN: 9781032633831 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781032633831 Typeset in Garamond by UKZN Press, South Africa

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For my parents.

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Contents

Acknowledgements ix Introduction: Finding My Way

1

Chapter One: Reimagining South African Literature

19

Chapter Two: Reimagining the ‘Literary’

47

Chapter Three: Reading ‘With’

73

Chapter Four: Writing Belief, Reading Belief

89

Chapter Five: Creative Non-Fiction: A Conversation with Antjie Krog

109

Chapter Six: Oral Literature in South Africa: Twenty Years On

133

Chapter Seven: ‘That Man Patton’: The Personal History of a Book

147

Conclusion: Recursive Futures? Or: What Rough Beast?

161

Bibliography 177 Index

195

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Acknowledgements

Early versions of some of these chapters appeared as journal articles in English in Africa, Current Writing, the Journal of Southern African Studies and Scrutiny2. I am grateful to the editors and referees of these journals for their inputs. The comments of the referees for the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press proved invaluable to me in producing the final version of the manuscript. I owe them a great debt of gratitude. Several colleagues have shared with me insights and suggestions that have fed into this project. My thanks to Antjie Krog, Michael Chapman, Hermann Wittenberg, Julia Martin, Nkosinathi Sithole, Annel Pieterse, Claire Scott, David Richards, Meg Vandermerwe, Kobus Moolman, Wendy Woodward, Hedley Twidle, Leon de Kock, Cheryl Stobie, Michael Wessels, Saurabh Dube, Ishita Banerjee-Dube and Ted Chamberlin. This book was produced as part of the Andrew W. Mellon funded project on ‘Rethinking South African Literature(s)’ in the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape. I am extremely grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its financial support of the broader project of which this is a part. My thanks to the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) for two fellowships during which I worked on this book. I am also grateful to the STIAS fellows who offered extremely useful advice and suggestions during the seminars I presented. My thanks are also extended to my deputy deans, Uma Dhupelia-Mesthrie, Tamara Shefer, Lindsay Clowes and Steward van Wyk, who shared the responsibility of covering for me at various stages while I was dean, so enabling me to take up the STIAS fellowships. I am grateful to the University of the Western Cape (UWC) for financial support for this research. Thanks also to the National Research Foundation (NRF) for financial support. ix

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The opinions expressed here are my own and are not necessarily attributable to the Mellon Foundation, STIAS, UWC or the NRF. My profound gratitude must go to University of KwaZulu-Natal Press for taking on this project. In particular, I am grateful to Kholeka Mabeta and Debra Primo for their support for the manuscript; to Sally Hines for managing the production process impeccably, as always; to Alison Lockhart for her sensitive and meticulous editing; and to Judith Shier for producing a wonderful index. Finally, as ever, my thanks must go to my son Michael for his consistent and unwavering support, and for sharing with me some of the vagaries of research and writing as he makes his way through his postgraduate studies. And to my wife Tracey for her love, support and assistance. She has walked every step of this journey, and many others, with me and her contribution is incalculable.

x

Finding My Way 1  INTRODUCTION

Finding My Way

For the last ten years I have been in the unusual – some might say fortunate – position of being an academic without a home department. This was, I assume, entirely accidental, as it appears that the human resources department simply neglected to assign me to an academic department when I moved to the University of the Western Cape to take up the position of dean of the Faculty of Arts. But like some accidents, this one may have proved fortuitous. While my work history and qualifications would make the Department of English my ‘natural’ home, after many years of teaching literature from first year to PhD, it has been refreshing for me – even invigorating – in the last decade to think and write about literature without the shadow presence of curriculum, syllabus, examinations and assessment, and with a purview across multiple departments and disciplines. I would never be so bold, or foolhardy, to claim that this vantage point is ‘better’; rather, it is simply different, and enlightening. This book offers a series of reflections on the field called South African literature, or sometimes just SA Lit., from the perspective of 2020. It emerges from my experiences of almost three decades of working in, and with, this field of writing and scholarship and is explicitly a personal intellectual exploration, though it does necessarily emerge from and reflect upon the institutional history of literary studies in this country and elsewhere. The book tries to make some sense of, and in, a field that has become so immeasurably complex and varied that it seems always to defy definition or delimitation, even as it stubbornly insists on its own significance as a category. The chapters operate in a realm of doubleness, exploring something that both is and can never be an identifiable body of work, or field of reading, study, living. Several interrelated questions weave themselves through the chapters: recovering the ‘literary’; literary studies ‘after theory’; religion and spirituality; ‘other’ 1

2  Duncan Brown 

modes of writing and reading; rereadings; South African literary history postapartheid; canonicity; national/transnational identity; and multilingualism and translation. Rather than constructing one ‘argument’, the book is a series of chapters that try to offer some answers to these interwoven questions, at times foregrounding one above others, but always keeping all in play. South African literature has recently come under sustained critical scrutiny by Leon de Kock, in his superb study Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing (2016). I explore the implications of De Kock’s study in the final chapter (along with some other recent studies). But my own title, Finding My Way, is a partial, not entirely serious, rejoinder to De Kock’s, in its insistence on offering some answers, or at least directions, even if – as the colloquial use of the phrase ‘finding my way’ suggests – they involve provisionality, improvisation, desperate ingenuity, making do, negotiating, hustling and moving forward, even when we are not sure where to. It is also very specifically my way, as readers are encouraged to plot their own ways through this terrain, and also because the chapters are indicative of where my own journey as a scholar and reader has taken or is taking me. Accordingly, while I use many of the conventions and concepts of contemporary academic literary studies, I try as far as possible not to shield myself behind the authorised anonymity that academic discourse assumes, and allow myself and some of my failings (and feelings) into the text. As a title, Finding My Way implies hope and possibility, even if in a partial, qualified way. As I will argue later, this book is also partly a response to the pessimism of much current humanities scholarship in which – whether as South Africans or as global citizens at the apparent mercy of the imperial ambitions of the United States and China – we view ourselves as helplessly gripped in the vice (in both senses) of what is routinely, and possibly not entirely accurately, described as ‘neoliberal capitalism’ and its cronies, corruption and crime, to the extent that action or the imagining of an alternative future are impossible. With regard to universities, this narrative has them helplessly enslaved to a model of corporatisation that discourages original thought or dissent. While being absolutely clear-eyed about the substantial problems we face, whether of

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brutal systemic injustice or simple personal demoralisation, I insist that we have to ‘find a way’. There is too much at stake not to.1 Other modes of writing How then to negotiate the (potentially disruptive) presence of other modes of knowing? — Julia Martin, ‘Imagination and the Eco-Social Crisis (or: Why I Write Creative Non-Fiction)’

As well as being a book about the changing field of South African literature, Finding My Way is also a book about, and of, attempts to find more amenable, engaging and intriguing modes of writing about literature more generally. It seeks to recover a sense of the imaginative, the literary, the affective, not only as things to value in the texts we read, but also as ways of understanding, reading and engaging with texts, as ways of writing criticism – of registering how books make us feel, as well as how they make us think. In this regard, it is perhaps a response to my own sheer boredom as a scholar and journal editor with much that is published in the form of academic journal articles, offering fairly predictable and schematic readings of novels (most often, rather than poems, plays, short stories, or the whole range of other genres now available to literary studies scholars), which do little to kindle the enthusiasm of the reader for the literary text under discussion, and operate in a kind of infernal closed circuit of conference presentation, journal article, publication subsidy, citation by another colleague (if one is fortunate), conference presentation of the next paper, journal publication, and so on. And frequently written in a language so clotted and dense, or so metaphorically allusive and abstruse, as to be intelligible only to a handful of other colleagues2 (along

1. At the Faculty of Arts Dean’s Distinguished Lecture, delivered at the University of the Western Cape by Jack Halberstam in August 2019, the respondent, Peace Kiguwa, raised the question of ‘how to live with joy’, despite current national and global crises. I found her question deeply compelling. 2. ‘Brown writes simply,’ said one academic in a review of one of my books, in the latter years of the theory wars. I assume it was meant as an insult; I took it as a compliment.

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the lines of ‘an optative desire for the social, endlessly deferred, inhabiting the residues of its own instantiations’).3 In the last three decades or so, literary theory has had something to answer for in this regard. ‘Go for posts’ is what rugby fans will frequently shout when their team is awarded a penalty within kicking distance in a closely contested match. It might also have been the injunction humanities scholars, especially those in literary studies, gave to one another and their students, in seeking theoretical or methodological frameworks for their projects: we turned to poststructuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, post-Marxism and, more recently, posthumanism (to misquote the musician Johannes Kerkorrel – ‘alles met ’n p’).4 The ‘post’ seemed to claim or signal a newness, a movement beyond, a sense of being at the cutting edge. At its best, it was enabling and opened up significant ways of understanding processes of representation, signification, textuality and identity construction, as well as the discursive operations of power and knowledge. At its worst, it was an uncritical importation and application of theory from Europe or the United States in a genuflection to the academy of the North, and set up new critical and theoretical orthodoxies to which literary texts were subjected in a kind of ‘social sciencing’ of literary studies. In this model, the critic became a sort of sub-Foucault, or sub-Levinas or -Derrida, subjecting the novel, almost as ‘data’, to theoretical explication. As Hedley Twidle has argued, it is little wonder that J.M. Coetzee was so prized by critics of this ilk, as the fearsome intellect and breadth of reading behind his novels rendered them almost ‘tailor made’ for theoretical dissection (2017: 99). Thankfully, one of Coetzee’s considerable gifts is his ability to create narratives that are open to readings on multiple levels, so his novels have consistently exceeded the theoretical flayings to which they have been subjected.

3. This ‘quotation’ is entirely made up and makes as little sense to me as much criticism/theory written in this genre. 4. The song ‘BMW’ by Die Gereformeerde Blues Band, of which Kerkorrel was the lead singer, satirises the conservatism of white South African politics in the late 1980s: ‘Ons stem vir die DP, ons stem vir die NP, ons stem vir die HNP, ons stem vir alles met ’n P, net nie die ANC  ’ (We vote for the DP, we vote for the NP, we vote for the HNP, we vote for anything with a P, just not the ANC).

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Rugby fans who object to the injunction to ‘go for posts’ will claim that kicking penalty goals is a dull, unimaginative way to win a game, without the flair, creativity and incisiveness required to score tries. Many might agree that ‘going for posts’ in academic study often produced similarly unimaginative triumphs, in the papers and journal articles that are as dull as a game won by slotted penalty goals. But, as the chapters of this book make abundantly clear, this is absolutely not a book denouncing theory. As I have said, theory has assisted us enormously in understanding multiple aspects of literary and cultural representation, and more broadly the varied and complex ways in which we are, or may be, human, or inhumane. And as I point out, via Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (2003), as long as we seek to think relatively systematically about things, we will always have ‘theory’. But we need not (always?) be merely its subjects, nor should we regard it as a telos, a having arrived, rather than an ongoing process of seeking and discovering. (In this respect, with the apparent movement beyond notions of the ‘postcolonial’ for ‘coloniality’, ‘decoloniality’ or ‘anticoloniality’, I was wryly amused to hear that a chain store called ‘Poco’ in my neighbourhood was closing its doors . . .). Seeking out ‘other modes of writing’ may not be to everyone’s taste. This is, in part, a book that emerges out of rejection. The third chapter was turned down by the first journal to which I submitted it, a wellestablished journal in the field of southern African studies, because the readers said ‘it could not decide whether it was a position paper, an opinion piece, a review article, or a journal article’. ‘But exactly!’, I wanted to respond, though I would have added that it is consciously all of these. It is a piece in which I tried, deliberately, to write my own biographical account of involvement in the development of the field of South African literary and cultural studies since 1990. I worked through all the major critical studies that had contributed to constituting the field, and reflected on my sense of what had gone right and what not, as well as on where we might go from here. It emerged out of my growing sense of frustration with the constrictions of academic writing in what is perhaps its most prescriptive form – the accredited journal article. So the journal’s readers were right in their analysis, but – in my opinion, of course – wrong in their judgement. Thankfully, another journal accepted it.

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The chapter titled ‘Creative Non-Fiction: A Conversation with Antjie Krog’ potentially faced a similar fate. I approached a leading journal of African literatures in the United States with the concept, and received a fairly curt response from the editor along the lines of ‘we don’t publish that sort of thing’. Perhaps had I described it as an interview, the editor might have been more receptive, but it is actually more than an interview in many ways, not least because Krog at times interrogates me about my work, as we seek to move jointly towards understanding. I do not offer these comments as replies or reproaches to the readers or editors (complaining about rejections generally only leaves the complainant sounding rather pathetic), but to point out the powerfully conservative and prescriptive conventions that still operate in many realms of academic publishing (often defended or upheld in the name of ‘good scholarship’), which seem to me unnecessarily constraining and stifling of ‘other’ ways of thinking and writing. I stressed earlier that the personal pronoun ‘my’ in the book title is deliberate: it is not ‘a’ way or ‘the’ way, but deliberately foregrounds ‘me’. In this, I am following the example of many academics or intellectuals who seek to inhabit the pronoun ‘I’ as a far more amenable, intriguing and credible space to think than the impersonality generally required or assumed in academic discourse. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto David Shields says in this regard, admittedly somewhat hyperbolically: ‘First person is where you can be more interesting; you don’t have to be much but a stumbling fool. And I find this leads to the more delightful expedition. The wisdom there is more precious than in the sage overview, which in many writers makes me nearly puke’ (2010: 182). As a reader, you may argue that many academics now routinely use the first person in their articles. This is true and to be welcomed, and is certainly a marked improvement on bizarre conventions like the insistence in certain areas of Marxist thought until recently on using ‘we’, even when there was only one author, which left a whole generation of earnest historical-materialists sounding like Queen Elizabeth. But even when many academics now write in the first person, the referent of the ‘I’ is still in effect ‘this paper’, rather than the somewhat fallible human being trying to extend her or his range of knowledge and that of the reader. In the chapters in the book dealing with the development of the study of South African literature, I

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offer a narrative sometimes peopled by the characters who gave shape to the field, as much as the papers, chapters or books through which they did so. In referring to my own work, I describe it as such, rather than referring to myself as ‘Brown’, which thankfully no one has called me since high school. There are far more radical attempts to write ‘differently’ than anything I propose here. Reality Hunger (Shields 2010) is a case in point. It abandons discursive prose altogether for a 219-page collection of 618 quotations, aphorisms, anecdotes and observations, which are unattributed in the body of the text and only reluctantly attributed in the endnotes at the insistence of the publishers’ lawyers. Shields points out in an afterword: I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature. A major focus of Reality Hunger is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. [. . .] However, Random House lawyers determined that it was necessary for me to provide a complete list of citations; the list follows (except, of course, for any sources I couldn’t find or forgot along the way) (2010: 209). But he offers this advice: ‘If you would like to restore this book to the form in which I intended it to be read, simply grab a sharp pair of scissors or a razor blade or box cutter and remove pages 207–219 by cutting along the dotted line’ (Shields 2010: 209). While his book is in one way a response to the explosion of textualities that have characterised the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – which massively complicate notions of originality, ownership and attribution – Shields also registers the long history of these issues: ‘In 450 b.c., Bacchylides wrote, “One author pilfers the best of another and calls it tradition” ’; and ‘In the second century b.c., Terence said, “There’s nothing to say that hasn’t been said before” ’ (2010: 7). Shields says that his

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intent is to write an ars poetica [deliberately lower-case] for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media (lyric essay, prose poem, collage novel, visual art, film, television, radio, performance art, rap, stand-up comedy, graffiti) who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work (2010: 3). This list of art forms, however, like the opening line of the blurb on the inside front cover, ‘Reality TV dominates broadband’, sounds rather dated from the perspective of 2020; and, like many attempts at radical innovation that rapidly lose their novelty, for all its textual experimentation, Reality Hunger feels a little stale and gimmicky ten years after its first appearance. More interesting to me are attempts at drawing other modes of writing and thinking into academic discourse, or drawing academic expectations into other genres, so that we expand the possibilities of what is available to us as thinkers and writers in the humanities, rather than seeking a radical break with what has gone before (which we cannot actually do, as it has formed, and continues to inform, how and what we think). A key aspect of this approach to writing and research is to start breaking down the binary between ‘critical’ and ‘creative’ thinking and incorporating personal biography and experience into ‘arguments’, rather than staging an impersonal authorial presence; producing a scholarship that is perhaps more human and humane (and more fun), though no less rigorous.5 It is also a scholarship that is not shy of humour or irreverence, and understands that one can be serious without being solemn. Despite fine examples in this regard, such as Eagleton’s work, humour is a convention generally frowned upon in academia.6 As I note in Chapter 5, I have a long-standing interest in work that creates its meanings at the unstable fault line of the literary and 5. Julia Martin refers in her piece ‘Imagination and the Eco-Social Crisis (or: Why I Write Creative Non-Fiction)’ (2020: 232) to my rather flippant comment in a seminar she presented that this form of writing is ‘more difficult, but more fun’. 6. I recall my Master’s supervisor, the redoubtable Margaret Lenta, dutifully editing all jokes out of my thesis. More recently, I was chided in two readers’ reports, on two different books, for humour that was deemed ‘inappropriate’.

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journalistic, the imaginative and the reportorial, fuelled initially by the work of American ‘New Journalists’ like Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe, and in South Africa by some of the Drum writers and the work of Shaun Johnson, Max du Preez and later Antjie Krog. I have utilised the genre loosely called ‘creative non-fiction’ in two other book-length projects: Are Trout South African? Stories of Fish, People and Places (2013); and Wilder Lives: Humans and Our Environments (2019). Finding My Way is not a book of creative non-fiction, but it does engage with the genre at times and also draws certain of its techniques into literary criticism – it tries to ‘loosen up’ criticism a little – so I want to explore some of its assumptions and possibilities, as set out by three of its exponents: Julia Martin; Hedley Twidle; and Rob Nixon. I do so partly to explore possible limits to what one may do while still remaining academically ‘credible’. Other notable examples of works that seek to expand the possibilities of academic writing in the field of South African literary and cultural studies include Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall’s edited volumes At Risk (2007) and Load Shedding (2009), Sarah Nuttall’s edited volume Beautiful Ugly (2006), Sally-Ann Murray’s doctoral thesis (1998), Njabulo S. Ndebele’s Fine Lines from the Box (2007), Julia Martin’s Writing Home (2002) and A Millimetre of Dust (2008), Imraan Coovadia’s Transformations (2012b), Megan Jones and Jacob Dlamini’s edited volume Categories of Persons (2013), Michael Chapman’s book on Douglas Livingstone, Green in Black-and-White Times (2016) and Christopher Ballantine, Michael Chapman, Kira Erwin and Gerhard Maré’s edited collection Living Together, Living Apart? (2017). Claire Scott’s insightful book, At the Fault Line (2018), is a study of the genre, rather than an example of it. The literary and the critical Martin uses the genre of literary non-fiction to explore issues of place, identity and environment, but her approach has wider significance and implications for academic writing in the humanities.7 In ‘Imagination 7. Martin has repeatedly expressed her preference for the term ‘literary non-fiction’ over the other commonly used term ‘creative non-fiction’, although the subtitle of the piece referred to here is actually ‘Or Why I Write Creative Non-Fiction’. The distinction is not of great significance for my discussion here, however.

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and the Eco-Social Crisis’, she asks the question: ‘What do literary texts enable us to say or do in relation to the eco-social crisis that is not so readily expressed in other forms of discourse?’ (Martin 2020: 219). It is not a question that allows a single answer, and she reflects on her own work and practice in providing some responses. She talks of ‘extend[ing] the reach of my writing beyond the limited readership of traditional academic discourse [. . .] to admit such radical modes of knowing as may only be expressed through literature’, and of ‘negotiating between the narrative approaches of memoir and the prose styles of the literary essay in an attempt to unsettle binary or absolutist thinking, and to reveal in its place inextricability and ecological interconnectedness’ (219). It is an approach to writing that ‘considers stylistic choices to be a significant vehicle of meaning, offers a standpoint for situated truth claims while making ample room for ambiguity and ambivalence, and places trust in the imagination as a way of knowing’ (219). Martin finds in other modes of writing more expansive and energising possibilities. She refers to the potential of a literary discourse for enlivening our own practice as academics in the Environmental Humanities: changing the way we ourselves write. My conviction is that the unprecedented times we find ourselves in require us to reconsider not only the priorities we bring to scholarship and teaching, but also the forms in which we write or convey knowledge. So the present urgency has led me to extend the reach of my writing beyond the limited readership of traditional academic discourse, and to experiment with such modes of knowing as may only be expressed through a more ‘literary’ language (Martin 2020: 220). An additional advantage, of course, is that genre ‘bending’ or ‘crossing’ almost immediately takes the author and reader into the challenging and enlivening realm of the interdisciplinary. In contrasting her approach to writing with that of more conventional academic discourse (acknowledging that that is not a monolithic category), Martin identifies seven characteristics required of the conventional journal article:

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• discipline – ‘academic writing involves verifiable research, correctness of assertions, knowledge of the field, and is rigorous in approach’; • reason – ‘the rational is elevated over emotion (or the senses, or the imagination), as the primary way of knowing, both for the writer and for the reader’; • analysis – ‘the primary mode of investigation is the analytic, with critique and argument as its key expressions [. . .] it tends to use evidence to draw certain conclusions’; • the critic – ‘in literary studies, this emphasis on reason and the analytic not only foregrounds the role of the critic over the practitioner and gives little place for appreciation, but also (implicitly) tends to elevate the value of criticism and theory over creative practice’; • jargon – reliance on ‘familiarity with specialised terminology’; • power – ‘such modes of writing tend to have a high currency in the academic power-knowledge economy’; and • exclusion – ‘academic publication tend to be exclusionary in terms of audience’ (Martin 2020: 222–3). For Martin, literary non-fiction retains the responsibility and rigour required of academic writing, but abandons some of its more limiting chacteristics: it is a ‘place where meticulous research, personal reflection, high quality prose, and imaginative fictions can meet’ (2020: 225). She cites the example of W.G. Sebald, who ‘wrote limpid discussions of writers and artists that “trace a path between critical essay, life writing, and creative writing” (2014: xv)’ (Martin 2020: 220).8 I would add as additional exemplars in this regard Jonathan Raban’s superb essays on Mark Twain and Philip Larkin, which are two of the most insightful and well-written pieces of criticism I have read anywhere.9 Martin then considers the complex question: ‘How far can you take this: what elements need to be retained, if the text is to remain in any sense academic?’ (2020: 227). 8. Martin is quoting from W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country (New York: Penguin Random House, 2014). 9. Republished in Raban’s collection of essays, Driving Home (2013).

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She identifies, from reflection on her own research and writing practice, seven ‘priorities’ or criteria for more imaginative, but nevertheless rigorous, modes of writing: accuracy; speculation; openness; style; subjectivity; feelings; and audience. I hope they apply equally to the chapters of Finding My Way that follow. Accuracy: ‘The key criteria of rigour, discipline and meticulous research for academic writing apply equally to all credible non-fiction’ (Martin 2020: 220). Speculation: ‘What you do with this research material (and its silences) is much of what makes the essay interesting.’ She talks of ‘being open to a more imaginative interpretation of the [. . .] material’ (Martin 2020: 227), and quotes Rob Nixon’s assertion: ‘ “As a reader, I’m partial to generic edgelands where documentary forms and fictional strategies mingle and liaise [. . .] episodes of speculative consciousness within non-fiction where the historical archive otherwise would only deliver silence” (Nixon 2012: 33)’.10 My discussion of the strange in-betweenness of Adam Ashforth’s work on witchcraft in Chapter 4 is perhaps a case in point. Openness: ‘While academic discourse uses argument and evidence to reach a decisive conclusion, or to promote a particular thesis, the creative imagination tends not to be much interested in final assertions’ (Martin 2020: 228). Martin quotes Hedley Twidle’s observation that ‘the privilege of the literary is surely to remain naggingly unfinished, opening out into a world of human relations that extend beyond the reach of political science. This though, is not necessarily the preserve of the novel  ’ (2012: 23). In other words, literary prose may well have these qualities, even when it’s not fiction (Martin 2020: 228).11 In the essays in this book, I consistently express my concern to avoid the monumentalising study for a model of more mobile, tentative, suggestive scholarship and also my comfort with paradox and open-endedness. 10. Martin is quoting from Rob Nixon, ‘Non-Fiction Booms, North and South: A Transatlantic Perspective’, Safundi 13 (1–2) (2012): 29–49. 11. Martin is quoting from Hedley Twidle, ‘In a Country Where You Couldn’t Make This Shit up’, Safundi 13 (1–2) (2012): 5–28.

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Style : ‘For academics in literary studies, writing literary essays is an opportunity to use our already highly developed sensitivity to literary style to extend the possibilities of our writing beyond the habitual frames of critique and analysis that the academic article tends to prescribe. As W.G. Sebald illustrates by example, even when writing academic essays, the quality of the prose can itself be a vehicle of meaning’ (Martin 2020: 229). As well as debating these questions at length with Antjie Krog in Chapter 5, I try, especially in chapters 1, 2 and 7, also to allow the style – by turns literary, autobiographical, anecdotal, critical (the various ‘voices’ to which the journal’s referees objected) – to carry the argument into areas that more workman-like prose cannot reach. In this regard, in Reality Hunger, Shields quotes John D’Agata: In 1830, Emerson was frustrated with his sermons, with their ‘cold, mechanical preparations for a delivery most decorous – fine, pretty things, wise things – but no arrows, no axes, no nectar, no growling’. He wanted to find what he called ‘a new literature’. A German con artist, Johann Maelzel, visited America with a ‘panharmonicon’, an organ without keys. He would crank its heavy silver lever three times and step off to the sides, and the machine would spit out an entire orchestra’s worth of sound: flutes, drums, trumpets, cymbals, trombones, a triangle, clarinets, violins. After seeing ‘Maelzel’s machine perform, Emerson called the new literature he’d been looking for “a panharmonicon. Here everything is admissible – philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humour, fun, mimicry, jokes, ventriloquism – all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversation, highest and lowest personal topics: all are permitted, and all may be combined into one speech” ’ (Shields 2010: 17). Subjectivity : ‘Although we really do know these days that the observer is always implicated in what is being observed, much academic writing in the humanities still avoids using the personal pronoun, and students are taught this as one of the basics for writing an essay. By contrast, creative non-fiction tends to claim the opportunity to say “I”, and writing an

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essay is a chance both to “situate” knowledge spatially and temporally, and to write quite intimately from “inside a personal voice” ’ (Martin 2020: 230). Feeling s: ‘Once the imagination is admitted into our academic writing as a way of knowing, it claims a place for the reader’s visceral, felt experience: emotions and the senses, the lyrical, the beautiful, the sublime, the possibility of wonder, play, horror, fear, and an emphasis on “heart” as well as “mind” ’ (Martin 2020: 231). This point relates to ‘openness’ raised above, in allowing an open-endedness to the writing, a reliance at times on the allusive, the suggestive, rather than the tightly closed argument. Audience : ‘The decision to use a non-specialist language to write essays for a wider audience (the so-called “general reader”) turns the literary scholar into some version of the public intellectual’ (Martin 2020: 231). Abandoning (some of ) the armour of one’s academic discourse is also salutary, humbling and revelatory for thinking differently. Hedley Twidle is another author and critic who has reflected very interestingly on ‘other modes of writing’. On the genre of creative nonfiction, he notes that ‘reading the Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction list against the Sunday Times Fiction prize for the last ten years, who would deny that in terms of ambition, risk, and sheer writerly work, the non-fiction winners comprise the more compelling and influential body of texts from southern Africa?’ (2012: 9). Twidle’s point is that if ‘the literary’ was ever the sole preserve of ‘literature’, which is not a position I would imagine many might defend, it certainly is not now, and ‘this productive clustering of fiction, life writing, microhistory and journalism [within creative non-fiction] suggests how accounting for the literary in contemporary South Africa asks for a method of cross-reading’. In fact, it seems that this approach should extend to literary criticism itself, as well as to much else: [It] would be one which plays across different genres and modes of address rather than remaining trapped within those protocols of symbolic exchange that thrive on an endless series of tired oppositions: ‘the novel’ versus ‘history’; ‘aesthetics’ versus ‘raw experience’; ‘committed’ versus ‘formalist’. If the task of the critic is to enlarge the space in which any given text can resonate, then

Finding My Way 15 

much contemporary writing requires that traditional ‘literary’ forms like the novel are read alongside or in counterpoint to all kinds of other work in prose (or indeed film, visual and performance culture) (Twidle 2012: 24–5). This is an approach that radically expands the possibilities for criticism and the intertexts with which it might seek to engage. As Shields notes, ‘Genre is [or, perhaps I should add, should be] a minimum security prison’ (2010: 70). Rob Nixon talks about his predilection for texts that ‘scavenge for invigorating ways to trade body fluids with other forms: Essays, travel literature, polemics, ethnographies, histories and oral histories, journals, literary criticism, graphic memoirs, aphorisms, documentary photography, literary journalism, and public science writing’ (2010: 3). He holds up as exemplars of excellent scholarship four genre-bending works: Jeff Peires’s The Dead Will Arise (1989); Isabel Hofmeyr’s We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told (1993); and Charles van Onselen’s The Small Matter of a Horse (1984) and The Seed is Mine (1996). ‘All four books,’ Nixon says, ‘are more than fine, textured histories; they’re also exemplary, deeply affecting works of non-fictional narrative art, works that are unlikely to be surpassed’ (2012: 42). I have referred to the way in which the impersonal authorial presence of the academic article conceals as much as it reveals, and how it constructs its own authority. Twidle also reveals how the genre of the academic article serves to elide the processes of its own generation, almost as if it must appear fully- and self-born. In contrast, he points out: One way of understanding the personal essay is as a form that allows the writer to give not only her or his thoughts but also the narrative of how she or he came by them. More specialised and academic forms of writing need to appear more knowing from the outset: it is harder for them to admit the moment of encounter, of reading or seeing or listening to something for the first time. Also, the scholarly mode tends to imply that we discover things in the right order, in a linear fashion that implies a logic of steady intellectual growth and development, of one thing leading to another (2017: 75).

16  Duncan Brown 

With Twidle, I am after a more honest mode of writing, which can admit to its own wrong turns and dead ends (of course, only where these are interesting or instructive), acknowledging nonetheless that honesty is more about contractual relationship with the reader than with anything like agreed-upon veracity. Part of this honesty means turning the gaze back upon our own assumptions (and prejudices) as humanities scholars, including seeking ways to acknowledge in a seemingly relentlessly secular academic context (with the obvious exceptions of theology and anthropology) that religion and spirituality are significant aspects of humanity (and thus literature and culture). As is evident in the chapters on Nontsizi Mgqwetho and Adam Ashforth, and in the dialogue with Antjie Krog, part of my concern with writing and criticism that cross genres lies in their ability to engage seriously with the religious and spiritual, and their affective and imaginative dimensions, while avoiding the crass reductiveness of approaches in which faith and belief are seen as the binary opposites of reason, and in which believers are either tacitly or explicitly constructed as non-rational. I am intrigued by ways in which one can read ‘with’ rather than ‘against’ beliefs, even if we do not share them; how we may more fully account (for) them and their significance in the lives of believers. Many of the techniques of literature – focalisation, narrative, symbolism, characterisation, dialogue and imagery, to name the most obvious – have significant possibilities in this respect and, as I point out in Chapter 4, the avowed materialist Terry Eagleton proves a surprising but powerful ally in this project. ‘For God’s sake, say something!’ Towards the end of his collection of creative non-fiction essays, Fire Pool: Experiences in an Abnormal World, which is hands-down one of the best things I have read from South Africa recently, Hedley Twidle comments about the frequently disabling effects of our own critical discourse: ‘We must ban the words “nuance” and “complexity”.’ I heard a speaker say this at a book launch [. . .] Part of me loved this; how many seminars have I sat through where the argument goes: ‘It’s more complex than that,’ or ‘I think we need to take a more

Finding My Way 17 

nuanced position.’ You want to shake them and say: for God’s sake, say something! No more nuance and complexity. I wanted to stand up and applaud (2017: 245). While the context of the remarks proves problematically entangled in the rather pointless political question of whether white men can/should speak, the directness and robustness of that call resonates with me to the extent that I would join Twidle in his applause. There is too frequently a certain ennui or frustration to reading articles or book manuscripts as a referee and encountering precisely what Twidle identifies: a reluctance or timidity to say anything beyond what amounts to, ‘Things are more complex then they may appear.’ I frequently want to shout, with Twidle, ‘Then say something! Anything! What should we do? I do not finally care if you are wrong.12 Even if you are, at least we will have moved forward a little.’ Whatever their faults, and there are no doubt many, I hope that the chapters in this book actually ‘say something’, that they propose something to be done or done differently. I have tried to ensure that they are not heavily cloaked in the conventions of academic prose whose generic assumptions, while they are explicitly taught and policed, are in an act of double bluff also assumed to signify neutrality, impartiality, reason. I have sought out forms of writing that I find more amenable, lively, enjoyable and challenging, and which remind me of why I fell in love with words and literature in the first place, even if – as with all loves – it can sometimes be a difficult and troubled relationship. These chapters also emerge from my own discomfort and unease when researchers in other fields ask me what my discipline is and I scrabble for an answer (‘literary and cultural studies’ is the best I can

12. In this regard I recall attending a seminar while on a research fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, in which the physician Ray Melamed made a bold argument that the survival of Homo sapiens (and not Neanderthals) was a result of their having a greater capacity for imagination and narrative. It struck me at the time as an argument that was almost impossible either to refute or confirm. It does not actually matter whether it was or wasn’t true, as it nevertheless really stimulates our thinking in intriguing ways about imagination and narrative, both then and now.

18  Duncan Brown 

usually offer) – not because I have ‘lost faith’ in the literary, quite the contrary, but because I find it difficult to explain that I am trying to do something different, more, than simply produce new readings of South African literary texts, even if I struggle to articulate my project to myself, at times. So maybe this book is the best answer I can give to that question at present. As the title of the book suggests, these are ‘my’ views. I hope you enjoy them.

Finding My Way 19  CHAPTER ONE

Reimagining South African Literature

Three major studies on South African literature have been published in the last decade: Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper and Craig MacKenzie’s The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945 (2010); Michael Chapman and Margaret Lenta’s SA Lit: Beyond 2000 (2011); and David Attwell and Derek Attridge’s The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012). In his introduction to SA Lit: Beyond 2000, Chapman lists no less than fifteen journal special issues broadly directed towards literary studies in postapartheid South Africa (Chapman and Lenta 2011: 13, note 1). Several conferences and colloquia have focused on this subject, including the 2008 workshop on ‘The State of Literary Studies in South Africa’ held at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in 2008, and the 2011 conference of the Association of University English Teachers of South Africa. There are also four book-length studies specifically on South African literature post-1990: Shane Graham’s South African Literature after the Truth Commission, first published in 2009 in the United States and then in South Africa in 2011; Monica Popescu’s South African Literature beyond the Cold War (2010); Leon de Kock’s Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing (2016); and most recently Hedley Twidle’s Experiments with Truth: Narrative Non-Fiction and the Coming of Democracy in South Africa (2019). On the face of it, South African literature would appear to be secure and flourishing, especially in the readings of the three book-length studies I focus on in this chapter – Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie’s Columbia Guide, Chapman and Lenta’s SA Lit and Attwell and Attridge’s Cambridge History – under the sign and seal of two major international and two local university presses. But I wish to argue that the appearance 19

20  Duncan Brown 

may be deceptive, and what might be seen as vitality and variety may instead be read as obsessive attempts at (re)suturing a seam that is perpetually rending, to borrow De Kock’s suggestive metaphor (2005). All three of the major studies and several of the journal special issues directly engage with, and I would argue are haunted by, the question De Kock asked in 2005: ‘Does South African literature still exist?’ That question dropped like a mine into the already troubled waters of literary debate in the years following the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, and has lurked ominously beneath the surface of literary discussion ever since. Much of the attention paid to De Kock’s question has focused on the qualifier ‘South African’ and has sought – explicitly or implicitly – to argue for or against a (usually suitably qualified, provisional, hesitant) sense of what might constitute a South African commonality within difference. I engage with these debates, but I want also to direct attention to the noun ‘literature’ and more broadly ‘literariness’ in current critical discourse in South Africa and beyond. It is the aspect of De Kock’s question less frequently addressed, though no less significant (and troubling) in its implications. What do the three major studies focused on in this chapter have to offer to readers and critics of South African literature? The question ‘Does South African literature still exist?’ is at once unsettling and liberating: unsettling in potentially undermining the literary cartography from KhoiSan to Krog (via Pringle, Campbell, Plaatje, Abrahams, Paton, Gordimer, Mphahlele, Serote, Fugard, Livingstone, Coetzee, Mda, Vladislavić, Mpe, and so on), which most of us are familiar with; and liberating because, as De Kock notes, the place it mapped was often one of ‘asphyxiating repetition and nausea-inducing pain, a play of stereotype and antitype’ (2005: 77). A whole range of scholars, including myself, have in the years following the democratic elections of 1994 attempted responses to the issues of commonality and difference in South African literary and cultural history, whether directly or obliquely. As much as the sign of ‘South African literature’ appears to be under erasure, it also insistently reconstitutes itself, even on the keyboards of those who would place it under the most severe interrogation: the question always seems to exceed the response – in fact, to announce a presence in the very act of questioning.

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A key problem (some might say symptom) within the study of South African literature postapartheid has been dispersal, something against which the three major studies may be seen by some to ‘shore up fragments’. Dispersal, a movement away from a relatively bounded area of study, whether a ‘regional’ or ‘national’ literature, or the very category of ‘literature’ itself is, of course, not something restricted to South Africa, but is widely evident in literary studies across the globe, more of which below. De Kock is worth quoting at some length on the issue of dispersal: On the matter of dispersal of focus among the scholars working loosely with South African literary studies, it is clear to me that individual scholars often find a more secure and, to be frank, more ‘sexy’ purchase on publication – in their own name – by pursuing topics in what might broadly be called cultural studies, particularly the many absorbing themes that have arisen in the wake of transnational phenomena, such as the ecologies of city and migrancy, the lineages of notions such as ‘ugly’ and ‘beautiful’, the cross-inflected improvisational shapes of jazz as a form of discursive or extra-discursive expression, the practices of everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa, reconfigured senses of connection (for example, the ‘Indian Ocean world’ as an alternative to the ‘Black Atlantic’), whiteness studies, cosmopolitanisms, and so on. I do not excuse myself from this list (2008: 112). With the possibility of exploring ‘such alluring literary-cultural topics’, De Kock asks: Who wants, humbly and selflessly, to be a reader in service of other writers? Who wants, assiduously, to track and trace, to read and reconsider, the work of writers of an emerging generation, a generation that is increasingly hard to read according to older templates, when the temptation to be a writer oneself, to be an academic ‘rock star’ in one’s own name, inventing one’s own topics, is so much more appealing (2008: 112).

22  Duncan Brown 

While I agree with De Kock in his argument about the seductive allure of such work (though perhaps his phrasing may be overly monastic), I think there are more fundamental and troubling issues behind this dispersal, not least of which is a discomfort with the very category and concept of the ‘literary’, particularly in the wake of the ‘theory wars’ of the 1980s and the degree of foot-shuffling among literary scholars in the ‘after theory’ period, however problematic that appellation may be. The result, nonetheless, has been a field of scholarship increasingly out of touch with the literature on which it is ostensibly predicated. Let me make the point in another way. Some years ago, after a few glasses of wine, a colleague of mine who is one of the leading scholars of South African literature commented that he thought South African criticism in the 1980s was probably better than the literature. I do not want to consider the validity of his comment here, but simply to point out that no one would dare say that of the current situation. We had a sense, as critics, that with the demise of apartheid, South African literature would lose its subject. Ironically, it seems to me that it is literary criticism that is foundering: South African literary studies has, in a sense, lost its intellectual project. Do the three studies under discussion in this chapter take us any way towards remedying this? Jakes Gerwel made a similar argument about the humanities and social sciences more broadly in the context of postapartheid South Africa in an interview with John Higgins, published shortly after Gerwel’s death: In a strange way, apartheid played a huge role in the vibrancy of social and human sciences at the time. At the height of apartheid, sociology and historiography, for example, were vibrant and driving forces in the intellectual environment and public discourse. I often ask myself the question, in our epistemology or our conceptualisation, have we not lost a kind of raison d’être for the social and human sciences in the years that have followed? Did so much of the energy for the humanities and social sciences come from that oppositional energy that was set in motion by apartheid (Higgins 2013: 35)?

Finding My Way 23 

Judging by the range and depth of what is being published at present, the postapartheid literary scene is flourishing. But the scholarship seems to have fallen behind, leading scholars like De Kock to call for a return to the humbler task of simply cataloguing and classifying the vast output because, as he argues, we ‘need to keep track of a literary industry that has become diverse and productive in the last few years – so much so that I think the academy is once again several years behind the game’ (2005: 77). Postapartheid? Or: Is this it? A brief but important note on terminology is required before I proceed. There has been some debate about the term ‘postapartheid’ in humanities studies in South Africa recently, whether in terms of its perpetuation of a South African ‘exceptionalism’, its suggestion of a continuous inhabiting of the space of ‘interregnum’, its refusal to ‘name’ a new time and mode of being/identification, and so on. Loren Kruger, for example, talks of the ‘post anti-apartheid’ (2002: 35); Sarah Nuttall (2010) suggests that we should no longer talk of a society ‘in transition’; Michael Chapman proposes the term ‘post-postapartheid’ (2009: 15); Ronit Frenkel and Craig MacKenzie offer ‘post-transitional’ (2010: 1–2); and Leon de Kock refers to the ‘not-quite-post-apartheid’ South Africa (2011: 36). Robert Thornton argues that ‘South Africa seems likely to remain in permanent transition, just as it once seemed to exist perpetually just ahead of apocalypse’ (1996: 158). Graham Pechey warns that the term ‘postapartheid’ ‘defines a condition that has contradictorily always existed and yet is impossible of full realisation’ (1994: 153). Premesh Lalu (2009) insists that we should remain engaged with the postapartheid; that the deep intellectual (and economic) legacies of South African history require much more substantive interrogation if we are to avoid (even inadvertently) replicating in more ostensibly progressive guise arguments, concepts and categories that are problematic and disabling in their assumptions. My own position is akin to that of Lalu. Remaining with the question of the ‘postapartheid’, in the uneasy space and conception of what we are hoping to constitute, seems to me a political and ethical imperative. To refuse the state of transition is potentially (if unintentionally) to belittle the effects of four centuries of brutal history, to accept that ‘this is all there is’. More dangerously, it can lead to a political quietism,

24  Duncan Brown 

in which as scholars we simply watch (and perhaps eloquently describe) the rough beast that slouches from Mangaung or Marikana to be born. ‘But where’s the bloody horse?’ As a region under external colonial rule – Dutch, British – for several centuries; internal ‘colonising’ rule and enforced racial segregation for half a century; at times in its history consisting of several autonomous states (Boer republics, Cape Colony, not to mention the Bantustans, or the curiously constituted independent states of Lesotho and Swaziland) in what is now one country; being home to speakers of eleven official languages; and having been ‘settled’ by a range of peoples whose arrival ranges from 2 000 years to just a few years ago: South Africa is, in one reading, a place of radical heterogeneity and difference. At the same time, its history of legislated separation and oppression on the principle of divide and rule makes the desire for an embrace of unity almost impossible to refuse. The study of ‘South African literature’ has, since its substantive constitution as a field of study in the 1970s, been caught in the doubleness of those conflicting impulses. There have been many histories of individual literatures in South Africa, divided along linguistic lines, several studies that claim to cover ‘South African literature’, but tacitly redefine that category to include only texts in English, as well as some studies that attempt to range beyond linguistic divisions. But the question of whether there is such a beast as South African literature continues to stalk the corridors of many literature departments. And if so, to misquote Roy Campbell, where is ‘the bloody horse’, or donkey, zebra, mule, giraffe? Too often, one should add, it has simply been a beast of burden. Probably the earliest comprehensive study of something called ‘South African literature’ was Manfred Nathan’s book South African Literature: A General Survey, which appeared in 1925. It covered work in English, Afrikaans and Dutch (though not African languages) across a range of literary and non-literary genres. However, for many subsequent decades, the emphasis in literary studies in South Africa was on a single language or language grouping. A number of scholars have written well-researched and incisive studies of individual literatures in South Africa, divided along the lines of language or language groupings: on African languages, Albert S. Gérard

Finding My Way 25 

(1971) and D.B.Z. Ntuli and C.F. Swanepoel (1993); on Afrikaans, J.C. Kannemeyer (1978, 1993, 2005); on Xhosa, A.C. Jordan (1973), B.E.N. Mahlasela (1973), Jeff Opland (1983, 1998), Harold Scheub (1975, 1996) and Russell Kaschula (2002); on Zulu, B.W. Vilakazi (1945) and C.L.S. Nyembezi (1961); on Sotho, M. Damane and P.B. Sanders (1974); and, on English, Michael Chapman, Colin Gardner and Es’kia Mphahlele (1992) and Malvern van Wyk Smith (1990). Several other studies, especially more recently, have continued along these lines, though often substituting identification by race, gender or modality for that of language or language grouping: on black writing, Piniel Viriri Shava (1989), Jane Watts (1989) and David Attwell (2005); on Indian writing, Devarakshanam Betty Govinden (2008), Rajendra Chetty (2002) and Ronit Frenkel (2010); on the /Xam Bushmen, Michael Wessels (2010); on orality and performance, Liz Gunner (1984, 1989) and my own work (Brown 1998, 1999); on white writing, Claire Scott (2018) and Melissa Steyn (2001); and, on white women’s writing, Mary West (2009). One of the best-known attempts to define something called ‘South African literature’ in a collective sense is Stephen Gray’s Southern African Literature: An Introduction (1979), in which he proposes the cartographic/ geological model of an archipelago, with the different literatures (English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, and so on) comprising its ‘islands’, the peaks of which ‘protrude in set positions, even if one does not readily see the connections between them and the surface’ (Gray 1979: 3). As Attwell and Attridge note in the introduction to The Cambridge History of South African Literature, however, while the archipelago metaphor is appealing because it enables one to imagine the distinctive qualities of each of the literatures while positing the unity of the underlying landmass to which each is attached; nevertheless one suspects that its usefulness has something to do with its continuing to obscure rather than map its underlying unity (2012: 3). At the heart of Gray’s argument lies the question, they point out, of whether one constructs literary history in relation to a particular language, or whether one looks for ‘shaping influences [that] cut across language

26  Duncan Brown 

barriers’ (Attwell and Attridge 2012: 3). This is the question that just about all subsequent studies have grappled with. Michael Chapman’s landmark study, Southern African Literatures, which appeared in 1996, is the most sustained attempt to explore the substrate linking the distinctive islands of Gray’s archipelago. While his book appeared in a series of period or national studies of literatures in English published by Longman, Chapman argued that the singlelanguage model was inappropriate for the field of his study, and thanked Longman in his preface for permitting him ‘to step outside the strict designation of the series as literature in English and, in consequence, to be able to focus on what I regard as important works whatever the language of expression’ (1996: xvii). Works originally produced in other languages appear in Chapman’s study in English translation – the theory and practice of translation being integral to his methodology. Eschewing the arbitrariness of national borders of colonial origin in favour of the subcontinental region of ‘southern Africa’ – South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique and Namibia – Chapman sought a unifying ‘southern Africanness’ by suggesting ‘points of common reference in countries that, for better or worse, have entangled histories’ (1996: xv). Crucially, though, Chapman stressed that his study was seeking points of comparative conjuncture as a critical project, rather than positing that such conjunctures were widely evident: it was a ‘speaking into being’ of commonality, rather than an ‘unearthing’ (though compare the ambiguity of Seamus Heaney’s definition of poetry being ‘a dig for finds that end up being plants’ [1985: 41]). Chapman’s study had a clear political and ethical purpose, which was presented as rationale for the comparative approach: I do not intend to follow the general practice in most existing literary surveys and histories of balkanizing the literature into discrete ethnic units: units that can be unwitting reminders of the divide-and-rule tactics of the colonial legacy. Instead, I intend to construct the field on comparative considerations. [. . .] At a time when the intent in southern Africa is to move beyond the conflicts of the past and chart new directions, the potential

Finding My Way 27 

of the comparative method to investigate the intersections of traditionally enclosed categories seems to be an important function of literary history (Chapman 1996: xvi–xvii). Not only was the purpose of the study grounded in a clearly demarcated ethics and politics, Chapman was also quite explicit that his study was ‘reading for the political’ in the texts it selected and appraised, and that this approach involved, in a sense, bracketing off the literary, not only as a critical strategy but as a way of understanding the very category and functioning of literature in southern Africa: The point is that it is difficult, in the subcontinent, to separate literary discussion from a social referent when political events have attained the dimension of compelling public narratives. In societies of thin literary cultures, in fact, the art genres of fiction, poems and plays can easily be seen as mere reflections of massive activities in an external history. In granting such a perception its reality in the material circumstances of the region, I have based the present literary history on a social theory in which forms of literature are firmly tied to the event (Chapman 1996: 4). As a consequence, he notes, while the study of literature in the academic or artistic sense may want to remain receptive to the subjective impact of works, social responsibility demands that we attend not only to the richness of cultural heterogeneity but to inequitable distributions of power in economic, educational and literary resources [. . .] Literary activity, including the activity of criticism, is regarded as a social activity concerned with justice (Chapman 1996: 4). And in a critical position echoing that he adopted in 1988 in his article ‘The Liberated Zone: The Possibilities of Imaginative Expression in a State of Emergency’, Chapman said: ‘The initial premise of this study is that in the countries of southern Africa the texts of politics have wanted to overwhelm the texts of art’ (1996: 1); and he talked of ‘minimizing

28  Duncan Brown 

the division between the text and the historical event’ (8). His criteria for inclusion in his study were explicitly those of the work’s perceived contribution to social justice: ‘In deciding what writers or works are important in a politically contested field, I have granted most value to content that is politically committed to what may be considered generally as democratic, non-elitist activity in southern Africa’ (9; my emphasis). For Chapman, a study like Southern African Literatures was ‘itself a form of literature which not merely reflects what is in other texts, but which intervenes in the construction of a literary and moral narrative’ (1996: 4). It was, however, a narrative with which many disagreed. The less interesting disagreements, for my purposes, were voiced in terms of the representation of particular fields of literature (Afrikaans was particularly hotly debated), the inclusion/exclusion of particular authors, or the nature of the critical judgements passed on individual authors. More significant, for me, were the criticisms that Chapman was creating out of a context of radical fragmentation a notional narrative of unity (albeit not seamless or uncontested), which was unsustainable. Chapman’s book, and the broader project of postapartheid ‘nation building’ with which it was perhaps associated, elicited a series of strident criticisms. Malvern van Wyk Smith referred to the ‘unexamined premise’ in postapartheid literary historiographies that ‘underneath all the cultural and linguistic separatism of so many decades there is really a rockbed of infinitely complex intertextuality and commonality of purpose which has been wilfully obscured by South Africa’s political masters and cultural institutions’ (1996: 72). Van Wyk Smith took as his touchstone for the existence of a ‘national literature’ Harold Bloom’s argument in The Anxiety of Influence and Maps of Misreading, requiring ‘evidence of genuine intertextuality, of texts resonating intentionally to one another, and not merely exploring the same subject matter because they happen to have been written in the same part of the world’ (75). On this measure, Van Wyk Smith concluded that ‘South Africa’s literatures have, until quite recently, existed in quite stunning and, I grant, disheartening isolation’ (75). With differing emphases, Van Wyk Smith’s position was supported by Green (1996), De Kock (1996b) and others, and debates about models of unitary/fragmentary literary historiographies constituted the subject of two major books: Rethinking South African

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Literary History, edited by Johannes A. Smit, Johan van Wyk and JeanPhilippe Wade (1996), in which Van Wyk Smith’s, Green’s and De Kock’s contributions appeared; and South African Literary History: Totality and/or Fragment, edited by Erhard Reckwitz, Karin Reitner and Lucia Vennarini (1997). Perhaps stung by the sharpness of rebuke, or else chary of in any way being considered naive, or even worse ‘nationalist’, literary scholars appeared to retreat following these debates into the safer (De Kock says ‘sexier’) space of studies that drew particular (consciously limited?) thematic or discursive threads through South African literary and cultural studies: jazz in Michael Titlestad’s Making the Changes: Jazz in South African Literature and Reportage (2004); (bi)sexualities in Cheryl Stobie’s Somewhere in the Double Rainbow: Representations of Bisexuality in Post-Apartheid Novels (2007); women and gender in Meg Samuelson’s Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition (2007); place and identity in my own study To Speak of this Land: Identity and Belonging in South Africa and Beyond (Brown 2006) and Rita Barnard’s Apartheid and Beyond: South African Writers and the Politics of Place (2007); missionaries and mission presses in Leon de Kock’s Civilising Barbarians: Missionary Narrative and African Textual Response in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (1996a); self-styling in relation to the Y generation in Rosebank, Johannesburg (Nuttall 2004); or animal studies in Wendy Woodward’s The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives (2008). And yet, despite the volumes of ink and paper spent on expunging any trace of putative nationalism or national identity in literary studies, or the humanities more generally, in South Africa, the doubleness of commonality and radical difference that has always animated South African literature has again reasserted itself, though in suitably chastened form, and after sufficient time below the parapets, in various studies, notably in the three under discussion here. As Chapman points out in the introduction to SA Lit: Beyond 2000, a ‘key pursuit since the 1990s has been how to cope with the concept and practice of difference’ (2011: 3). The arguments made in this regard differ from Chapman’s position in Southern African Literatures in that they posit actual engagement, rather than assuming that the

30  Duncan Brown 

commonality is a function of the critical project: Nuttall and Michael’s ‘creolisation’ (2000); my own argument about a ‘mutual implication in a history of difference’ (Brown 2001: 767); De Kock’s ‘seam’ (2005); Attwell’s ‘transculturation’ (2005); Hofmeyr’s ‘transnationalism’ (2004); Sanders’s ‘complicity’ (2002); and Nuttall’s ‘entanglement’ (2009). (From the perspective of 2020 South Africa, I wonder whether rather than a ‘seam’, one should talk instead of a broken zip, which constantly needs to be reclosed, threatens always and disastrously to open, but provides the necessary degree of concealment required for social functioning.) As an alternative to theorising zones of commonality, other scholars have turned attention to the materiality of book production and distribution, especially with a historical view, the circuits they traversed and the ‘reading economies’ and ‘institutions of meaning’ that accompanied them – for example, Hofmeyr (2004, 2013), Van der Vlies (2007) and McDonald (2009). The only attempt to write a comprehensive study of ‘South African literature’ of which I am aware between Chapman’s book and the first of the three recent studies mentioned at the outset of this chapter is Christopher Heywood’s A History of South African Literature (2004). It is a very strange book for a variety of reasons, including the fact that while Heywood lists Chapman’s study in the bibliography, he nevertheless makes his argument about South African literary history as if it is without precedent or predecessors. Attwell and Attridge point out correctly that it ‘has not entered the debate in any serious sense because its historiography is too idiosyncratic and it is flawed by persistent factual errors’ (2012: 8). Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie’s The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945 is at once the most conservative of the three major studies in limiting itself to a specific historical time period (post-1945) and a specific language (English), and the most radical in its implications for criticism in its bold reinscription of ‘the literary’ – even if, as Terry Eagleton says, some of the best radical positions turn out to be the oldest (1983: 206). Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie’s argument begins with the acknowledgement that the very notion of ‘literary history’, ‘the life story, encoded in books, of a suprapersonal entity (the national culture, “the spirit of an age”, “the mind of the people”, and so on) has been treated

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with extreme scepticism by almost every literary-critical movement since the early twentieth century’ (2010: 1). This is chiefly because from the discipline’s early beginnings in Russian formalism through to its more recent poststructural turn, ‘the complaint has been that literary history is (necessarily?) about virtually anything and everything except literature’. In this regard they quote Roland Barthes’s assertion that ‘the work escapes’, for it is ‘something else than its history, the sum of its sources, influences or models’. They point out that postmodernism has introduced its own ‘strong suspicion of the normative and exclusionary effects of narrative itself ’. ‘The typical result’ of this state of affairs, they argue, ‘is the multi-authored collection of essays or “microhistories” of a focused or thematised kind, purposively and self-consciously restricted in range and perspective’. In an endnote they comment that Attwell and Attridge’s Cambridge History of South African Literature is an example of ‘just such a project’ (2010: 35). I disagree, in that I think that Attwell and Attridge’s study, despite its disclaimers, seeks to be as exhaustive as possible. To be fair to Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie, though, their judgement was made while the Cambridge History was still in progress, so it may not reflect accurately their views on the final published volume. Nevertheless, Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie consciously set out to ‘chart’ the field of South African literature in English since 1945, arguing that without a ‘basic map, we may find ourselves missing a sense of the general picture’ (2010: 1). There remains, they insist, ‘a place for the selective ordering and clarifying narrative of literary emergence’. This is a position for which I have some sympathy, though my own cartography may be rather different and more provisional. They have little to say about their choice of time frame, I assume because it was externally imposed. Their study is one in a series of Columbia guides to regional or national literatures since 1945, which includes The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel since 1945, The Columbia Guide to West African Literature in English since 1945, The Columbia Guide to Asian American Literature since 1945, The Columbia Guide to Central African Literature in English since 1945, The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English since 1945, The Columbia Guide to the Literature of Eastern Europe since 1945, and so on. As these titles suggest, some, though not all, of the Columbia guides restrict themselves

32  Duncan Brown 

to literatures in English. Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie argue that their own focus on one language (English) is a function of the South African context, since as a result of its ‘linguistic and cultural diversity [. . .] South Africa does not have – has never had, may well never have – a single national literature, in the sense of a body of writing to which all of its citizens have access and with whose representations all can identify’ (2010: 2). They acknowledge as ‘admirable’ the desire in literary histories to move away from the linguistic and cultural separations of apartheid, but judge that the efforts of Gray, Chapman and Heywood reflect nothing more than a ‘desire’ – ‘an optimistic gesture in the optative mood – the expression of a political ideology rather than an objectively existent state of affairs’ (2010: 3). In this they follow Van Wyk Smith’s argument outlined above about the radical separation of literatures along language/ racial lines in South Africa. They do acknowledge certain commonalities in the literary educations of writers in different languages, in that ‘the colonial cultural matrix – as embodied, for instance in school English syllabuses – has meant that generations of South Africans of every colour have been exposed to the same formative literary influences: Shakespeare’s plays, Romantic poetry, Victorian fiction’ (2010: 3). But, finally, they declare, ‘whatever “history” South African literature shares, this is not the “idiogenetic” system of formal exhaustion and renewal known as literary history, but the “allogenetic” history of social and political events and conditions’. What is presented by Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie as a critical strategy dictated by history is read, in contrast, by Attwell and Attridge as disappointingly conservative (2012: 9). While the authors of the Columbia Guide do look forward to a future in which multilingual possibilities of expression might increasingly be available, their approach seems to me potentially to become self-replicating in the ways in which students, and writers, are educated. And it seems to imply a scholarship rather at odds with much of the socially and aesthetically nimble, multivoiced literature being published in South Africa at present. Their study is, nevertheless, the most direct and challenging of the three major recent works in the claims it makes about literariness and literary value – indeed, the very category of literature itself – about which so many academics locally and internationally have, under the influence

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of social theory, the sociology of literature, Marxism, poststructuralism, poststructural Marxism or deconstruction, been wary, embarrassed or outright dismissive. Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie talk of the need to ‘recognize and respect the singularity of individual works and authors; works and authors, it must be said, which and whom it has been customary to read back into the general discourse of history, to subsume under broad generalisations of a sociological and political kind’ (2010: 4). Their preference instead is for ‘formalist notions of literariness’ involving a set of assumptions that they articulate at some length: These assumptions are as follows: that there exists in literature (or in some literature, at any rate) a species of artistic value that we shall call literary merit  ; that there is sufficient consensus in the English-speaking world concerning the criteria for recognizing literary merit that it makes sense to regard it as effectively inhering objectively in literary texts; that literary merit is essentially aesthetic in nature and the most significant factor in the assessment of overall worth of literary texts; and finally, that it is the responsibility of literary critics – including those who, in the role of literary historian, offer cursory overviews like the present one – to make discriminations of value and significance based on perceptions of literary merit (Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie 2010: 4). Accordingly, the purpose of the book ‘is, as its title suggests, to guide the reader to what is in the opinion of the authors most important – best, most worth bothering with, remembering or going back to – in South African writing since 1945’ (Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie 2010: 4). They defend the presentation of such critical ‘commonplaces [. . .] with all the flourish of a new and subversive polemic’ on grounds similar to those I outlined a little earlier: Not only in South Africa but, to an extent, in the Western academy at large – in recent decades a generalised suspicion of ‘literature’ (perceived as a privileged and therefore potentially discriminatory category in a nexus of social relations), together

34  Duncan Brown 

with the rise of multiculturalism, have injected sufficient political capital into the business of making attributions of literary value as to scare away most critics (and certainly academic critics) from doing it in public. In the overheated arena of cultural politics in South Africa in the 1980s, compelling arguments for the redundancy of the aesthetic, or at least its strict subordination to the political, were routinely made, and more than a trace of this puritanical attitude continues to inform the public discourse on the arts in South Africa today (Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie 2010: 5). This is a position for which I have considerable sympathy. But then they make a series of critical statements that I think are problematic. About the literature, they say: Much of the writing emanating from South Arica in the period under review sought primarily to document political oppression and stir the reader into doing something about it. To use the terms popularized by Roman Jakobson, the ‘referential’ and ‘conative’ functions of this literature threaten to usurp the dominance of its ‘poetic’ or aesthetic function (especially in so-called protest writing): the result is a less than fully literary literature, a literature deformed by its slavish deference to the discourse of history and to the representational mode privileged by history, social realism (Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie 2010: 8). J.M. Coetzee’s argument about the novel and history is yoked in as support for this argument in his ‘deplor[ing] what he saw as the prevailing tendency “to subsume the novel under history, to read novels as . . . imaginative investigations of real historical forces and real historical circumstances”, and consequently privilege texts that “supplement the history text” ’ (Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie 2010: 8). The argument seems questionable on at least two grounds. Firstly, ‘South African literature’, in terms of what was being published and studied, for example, in the politically charged period of the 1980s, ranged from the state of emergency performance poetry of Mzwakhe Mbuli to

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the elaborate metafiction of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Douglas Livingstone’s poems, Athol Fugard’s A Place with the Pigs, Ingrid de Kok’s Familiar Ground, Lionel Abrahams’s The Writer in Sand, Njabulo S. Ndebele’s ‘Fools’ and Other Stories, Ivan Vladislavić’s Missing Persons, and so on. Can all these works be described as ‘a literature deformed by its slavish deference to the discourse of history and to the representational mode privileged by history, social realism’? Secondly, the argument seems to me to involve a category error, in which debates about the project of creative work and that of criticism are conflated or interchanged. Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie seem to be talking about the former; Coetzee about the latter, about how the texts are read, and which are preferred. Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie I think compound this category error when they invoke what Albie Sachs called ‘solidarity criticism’: The predominant critical stance of the time, and one that continued to gain authority and consolidate its orthodoxy until the sea change of 1990, has been usefully categorized as ‘solidarity criticism’. Solidarity criticism is not a literary category at all but a political one, an epiphenomenon of the intensification of ‘the struggle’ against the South African government. It finds its purest expression in the slogan, ‘Culture is a weapon of the struggle’, which meant that writers and artists and other ‘cultural workers’ were required to devote their energies and expertise to furthering political ends. In this perspective, the more blatant and trenchant (and hence more ‘effective’) its propaganda effect, the better the writing (Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie 2010: 26). ‘Culture is a weapon of the struggle’ was a cry heard regularly from ‘cultural workers’ and also from some members of the Congress of South African Writers. It was heard rather more infrequently from the critics themselves, I recall. However, making that distinction is not to deny that there was a drive towards intensely political (‘historicised’, ‘theorised’) readings in the academy, simply to suggest that its roots, and implications, are somewhat more complex than the formulation above suggests. Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie themselves are not shy about making sweeping critical judgements such as:

36  Duncan Brown 

So much South African writing dating from the decades of oppression and resistance now seems irredeemably dull, stale, flat, clichéd, melodramatic, or sensational – dead, or just plain bad; of continuing value, like a corpse in a mortuary, only as a source of forensic evidence for the crime of which it is a product (2010: 8–9). And while I have to admit that I am not a great fan of Nadine Gordimer’s novels, with the exception of The Lying Days, A World of Strangers and Burger’s Daughter,1 even I am somewhat taken aback by their statement: As time passes, her novels will continue to be useful sources of historical data  –  South African society chronologically cross-sectioned, as it were – but are unlikely ever again to be as compelling to read as they were during the dark years of apartheid. One would like to be able to say that the ‘insider’s’ perspective that they afford is an intimate one charged with the textures of real life; or that the characters and situations presented are so fresh and free from cliché that they acquire (as it were) independent life in the reader’s imagination. But unfortunately, as the vast majority of her South African readers have attested, neither postulate is true, and Gordimer’s reputation within the country, both critical and popular, appears to be in decline (Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie 2010: 12). Also, with regard to white poets who are singled out for approbative comment, Guy Butler, Sidney Clouts and Don Maclennan seem to be it – not a mention of Douglas Livingstone or Ingrid de Kok in the introduction – and Stephen Watson is declared to be somehow deserving of the title of ‘poet laureate’ of the city of Cape Town (Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie 2010: 24), though it is not clear on what basis.

1. I had the misfortune of having to teach A Sport of Nature for some years, and probably the best thing I can say about it is, to quote my ex-colleague Tony Voss, that it could have been titled ‘Story of an African Femme’.

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Attwell and Attridge’s The Cambridge History of South African Literature is the most recent and ambitious attempt to make sense of something called ‘South African literature’. At a mammoth 877 pages, and including contributions from 41 scholars, excluding the editors themselves, it dwarfs other studies in sheer size. It takes its place alongside a range of multi-authored Cambridge studies on other ‘national’, ‘period’ or ‘regional’ literatures, including The Cambridge History of American Literature, The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, The Cambridge History of French Literature, The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, The Cambridge History of German Literature, The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, The Cambridge History of Korean Literature and The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, to name but a few. In their introduction, Attwell and Attridge argue that the ending of legislated apartheid and the establishment of a democratic system of government ‘make it possible to offer a survey of the entire history of South African literature that was formerly unavailable’ (2012: 1). They continue: ‘Readers of The Cambridge History of South African Literature will [. . .] find South Africa’s literary culture extraordinarily diverse in histories, voices and traditions’, the ‘source of which is the country’s social range and multilingualism’ (2012: 2). They describe the field of literary production as follows: Several literary traditions, oral and written, have fed into the complex array of verbal productions charted in this volume, at times influencing or infiltrating one other, and at other times ignoring or challenging one another. From indigenous folktales to European elite art, these traditions have been constantly reworked and reinvented, creating an extensive body of literary art that continues to grow, despite the smallness of the home market and very limited financial means of most potential readers (Attwell and Attridge 2012: 1). Despite the apparent promise, however, The Cambridge History of South African Literature is, at least to me, actually quite traditional in its demarcation of the field of ‘South African literature’, retaining a heavy emphasis on English literary production. Also, while the

38  Duncan Brown 

inclusion of at least some material on African-language publication, and slightly more on literature in Afrikaans, is welcome, the by now fairly conventional positioning of the oral and performative as a point of origin and historical record is perhaps unfortunate, and suggests to me a conception of the literary and aesthetic that is insufficiently responsive to the possibilities and insurrections of the oral-performative in a world of explosive technological opportunity and social rearrangement. Also, some of the categories of inquiry – writing and empire; mission presses; the metropolitan and the local; politics and the lyric; imperial romance; the historical novel; the New African movement; the literature of exile – sound a little stale (think back to Hedley Twidle’s assertion, referred to in my introduction, of the need to move beyond such categories, assumptions and false dichotomies), though perhaps the editors felt that these categories are so well established as to be ‘unavoidable’. The study appears in a series of histories of ‘national’ or ‘regional’ literatures, but Attwell and Attridge are understandably wary of the category ‘South African literature’, at least in its ‘nationalist’ sense. They argue that ‘the country’s literary range is so extensive that it places the idea of a national literature in question’ (2012: 2), and note that there is ‘no overriding, definitive principle of unity, although there have been several attempts to find a metaphor in which the principle of unityin-diversity might be instantiated’ (3). They cite Andries Oliphant’s characterisation of literary histories in South Africa as ‘monolingual’, ‘bilingual’ or ‘multilingual’ – Oliphant himself favours the latter (3, footnote 4) – stressing that their history too falls into the final category. In this it accords with Albert S. Gérard’s emphasis, as early as 1971, on the need for multilingual literary histories in contexts like South Africa. ‘We do not see our task as especially revisionist,’ Attwell and Attridge argue. ‘It is rather, the fulfilment of a long-held aspiration’ (4). But, as noted earlier, I am less convinced that this worthy ambition is actually achieved. But what model of ‘South African literature’ does the study propose, bearing in mind the wariness of the very notion expressed by the editors at the outset? Attwell and Attridge draw on Sisir Kumar Das’s work on Indian literary history, in which he argues that in a context of multilingualism,

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what defines the idea of a unitary Indian literary history [. . .] are forms of communality which are essentially cultural [. . .] religious and literary traditions reaching back to the concept to Bhāratavarsa mentioned in the Mahābharata, in which a ‘unified cultural zone’ is defined and in which a number of the ancient languages cross one another (Attwell and Attridge 2012: 4–5). They acknowledge, correctly, that nothing analogous exists in the South African context, but then proceed to identify three factors that might be enabling in identifying some sort of commonality in the field: ‘A unifying history which has produced some powerful national narratives’ (2012: 5); ‘the question of translingual influence, which is a persistent feature of South Africa’s cultural landscape’ (6); and ‘widespread practices of translingual writing and translation which reveal the extent to which multilingualism is constitutive of the field’ (7). They argue that Chapman’s Southern African Literatures is an example of a literary history constructed around the first of these factors, in which the ‘spine of historical event provides the basic points of reference for a collective history of the country’s many literatures’ (2012: 5). Attwell and Attridge are critical of Van Wyk Smith’s argument against a notion of ‘South African literature’, in that they perceive the specific criteria of Bloom’s argument to be incommensurate with the diversities of the South African literary and cultural landscape (2012: 6). Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie, who follow something of the line of argument set out by Van Wyk Smith in his own study Grounds of Contest: A Survey of South African English Literature (1990), also come in for some stick: The historiography adopted by Cornwell and colleagues [. . .] insists that properly literary history is only interested in what they call ‘idiogenetic’ processes, that is, the processes of ‘formal exhaustion and renewal’ that are internal to a particular tradition. The ‘allogenetic’, which is the history of ‘social and political events and conditions’, is regarded as falling outside of the domain of literary history. Their preference for the idiogenetic over the allogenetic, or internal over external causality, serves their purpose of justifying the Columbia Guide’s focus on English,

40  Duncan Brown 

but it would surely be in conflict with the sources informing their terms, which lie in the aesthetic theory of Marx and Engels (Attwell and Attridge 2012: 9). Attwell and Attridge’s approach accords with that of Oliphant in emphasising the ‘multilingual fact of South Africa’ (2012: 9); ‘the theoretical complexity of the field is deferred to history itself ’, in that South African modernity has consistently produced centrifugal forces which have undermined separatism. This historical fact translates into the pragmatism which recognizes, in Oliphant’s words, that ‘the object of South African literary studies may therefore be defined as consisting of all the literatures in languages spoken within the borders of South Africa as specified in the Constitution of 1996’ (Attwell and Attridge 2012: 10). Using another of Oliphant’s essays, Attwell and Attridge insist that this is not to imply a ‘national literature’, involving ‘a “single all-embracing narrative with a nationalist theme in which all the literatures are shown to have participated over time” ’ (2012: 10), for as Oliphant himself argues, ‘nowhere is the nation state, as the juridical and geopolitical entity, underpinned by a common national culture’. They argue that the ‘pragmatic definition of national literature which Oliphant proposes, which we have accepted, and which simply uses the plural, should not allow itself to be haunted by a chimera of cultural unity which is simply not currently a historical possibility’. Hence, Attwell and Attridge say, the insistence on ‘ceding authorship to a collective’ in producing a literary history that is ‘appropriately multi-voiced’ (2012: 11), though I would add that all the volumes in the Cambridge History series appear to be multi-authored, whatever definition of ‘national literature’ they may espouse. Rather more adventurous in its implications for rethinking the field is Michael Chapman and Margaret Lenta’s edited volume SA Lit: Beyond 2000, which appeared in 2011. Sadly Margaret Lenta passed away shortly after its publication. She was one of the unsung heroes of South African literary studies, a founding editor, with Chapman, Margaret Daymond and Johan Jacobs, of the journal Current Writing,

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which did much to establish a sustained scholarship in South African literature, and a supervisor and colleague who was exceedingly generous with her time and assistance to a whole range of scholars and students, including me – though not one to suffer fools gladly. I recall very clearly both her extreme kindness to me as a Master’s student when I fell ill with encephalitis, as well as her stern admonition when I was struggling with a deadline and a fellow student recommended some homeopathic remedy, which apparently assisted with concentration, that I should not try to address moral failings with medication. In his introduction, Chapman acknowledges that the ‘impulse to look beyond 2000’ was provoked by De Kock’s article ‘Does South African Literature Still Exist?’ (2005), which I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. While Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie’s and Attwell and Attridge’s studies are substantially concerned with (re)mapping the past, SA Lit: Beyond 2000, as its title suggests, looks both to the recent past and the future. Chapman says of the post-2000 phase that ‘books tangential to heavy politics, or even to local interest, have begun to receive national recognition’ (Chapman and Lenta 2011: 1). He cites as examples of texts that have received substantial attention, including awards, Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson (2008), Michiel Heyns’s Bodies Politic (2008), Coetzee’s ‘quieter, suburban Australian novels’, Imraan Coovadia’s High Low In-Between (2009), Sally-Ann Murray’s Small Moving Parts (2009), and also Peter Harris’s non-fiction narrative of human drama in In a Different Time (2008). While Chapman acknowledges that in Southern African Literatures he was concerned with the question, ‘Whose language, culture or story can be said to have authority in South Africa [. . .] when the end of apartheid has raised challenging questions as to what it is to be a South African, whether South Africa is a nation and, if so, what is its mythos?’ (Chapman and Lenta 2011: 6), his focus in this book is not on the doubleness of unity or fragment within South African literature, but on the doubleness of   South African literature’s national/ transnational character. The emphasis of the argument is on current or future directions within South African writing, but it draws support from the past, the understanding of which has been significantly enabled by studies such as those of Hofmeyr, Sanders, MacDonald and Van der Vlies on ‘book histories’ and the circuits of distribution, reading and value they trace:

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Most critics would concur with Van der Vlies’s conclusion that in South Africa (in fact, in the colonies or postcolonies, wherever the particular periphery) the ‘literary’, as a category, has been authorised not entirely by the local response, but by ‘complex, multipolar, fragmented, often inconsistent and at best selfinterested Anglophone metropolitan (both British and North American) fields of publishers, reviewers and readers’. [. . .] The character of a national cultural identity whether in South Africa, Nigeria, Australia, etc., is accordingly ambivalent (Chapman and Lenta 2011: 6). It is an argument that accords, for example, with the emphasis in Attwell’s Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (2005) on significant influences of, and often conscious engagement with, the European traditions in which many black South African authors had been immersed, for example, at school, as much as the writers may also have consciously turned away from, even explicitly denied, such traditions. Chapman points to two studies, Shane Graham’s South African Literature after the Truth Commission (2009) and Monica Popescu’s South African Literature beyond the Cold War (2010), which undertake a ‘mapping, or remapping, of the literary terrain’ (2011: 9), both of which emphasise that South African literary studies is increasingly taking a ‘transnational turn’. But even with the increasingly transnational emphasis or reach, Chapman argues that ‘there remains a historical need to anchor literatures, whether from South Africa, Africa, or any other peripheries of the North Atlantic circuit, somewhere in the world: somewhere shaped by the priorities of particular literary works’ (2011: 8). A crucial question to me in this regard is: To whom does it matter whether there is something called South African literature? What is at stake in retaining or denying the category? To take two contrasting examples, the novelist Imraan Coovadia said in an interview that his act of ‘borrowing’ Douglas Livingstone’s translation of a Shona love poem in his novel The Institute for Taxi Poetry (2012a) was an appropriate strategy within the particularities of South Africa’s literary history: South Africa is never going to be a place where you have an endless, unbroken literary tradition practised by the same people, at least

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rarely. Much more often someone ends up writing something, it ends up in an archive, someone picks it up, translates it, does something else with it. I think that is an interesting version of our tradition (in O’Toole 2013: 108). In counterpoint, while I was at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study on a research fellowship in 2013, the novelist Zakes Mda, who was at that time a writer in residence there, said in a lunchtime conversation that the question was of no consequence to him. ‘There is just literature’ was his response to those around the table. And then he added, pointing to me, ‘But maybe it matters to him, to the critics.’ I suspect that ‘South African literature’ is a category the implications of which are most profound for the reading and reception of works, whether by literary critics in university departments, schoolteachers, reviewers in newspapers and magazines, judges of literary awards, bloggers, creative writing programmes and the like – the diverse ‘public sphere’ of literary reception and (re)production, which may also include authors themselves (such as Coovadia, who is also the head of the University of Cape Town’s creative writing programme). The category provides a frame in which to read, but one that must fit loosely and remain open to resizing. As Chapman says: To label Coetzee or Gordimer a South African writer is constraining; not to label them South African writers is to ignore in their work the troubled ‘late colonial community’ in which they found their distinctive voices, the local accents of which probably played a decisive role in their Nobel recognition (Chapman and Lenta 2011: 11). Acknowledging that literary and cultural studies of the 1990s in South Africa ‘sought to cope with difference’, Chapman argues that post-2000, ‘the current priority might be how to connect in a society which at the same time is alert to the “transnational” perspective of Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson and the “indigeneity” of Mgqolozana’s A Man Who Is Not a Man’ (2011: 12). In making this argument, he recalls Attwell’s claim in Rewriting Modernity that ‘it is not simply that the post-apartheid society

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has heralded a “civil turn”; it is rather that a civil turn has been with us all along and that what is different now, to then, is “our capacity to recognise more intricately the complex picture”.’ The argument about the ‘civil turn’ having always ‘been there’ returns us to the vexed question – the question of South African literary history – of whether there is a commonality we can uncover (Gray, Nuttall and Michael, Attwell, Nuttall, Attwell and Attridge), especially in the more open intellectual spaces post-1994, or not (Van Wyk Smith, Cornwell, Klopper and MacKenzie, Green, the later De Kock), or whether we can/should read for commonality, for political reasons, reasons of convenience, intellectual order, critical coherence, and so on, all the while acknowledging that it is a provisional category (Chapman, the earlier De Kock). (As an aside, I am increasingly convinced of the fact that the ‘place’ from which one writes, geographically, is especially significant in South African humanities study, for as scholars we all tend to read our contexts as nationally metonymic: the jostling Afropolitanism and ‘risk’ of Gauteng; the stark extremes of wealth and poverty of the Western Cape; the radical schisms of settler gentility and rampant unemployment of the Eastern Cape; the overheated ethnicities of KwaZulu-Natal; and so on.) Perhaps more interesting for my purposes here, though, is that, in referring to the capacity of the ‘civil turn’ to present a ‘more complex picture’, Chapman adds: ‘It is a picture that reveals not only a civil, but also a literary turn to a more nuanced relationship between the text and its contexts of reception’ (Chapman and Lenta 2011: 12; my emphasis). ‘In such spaces,’ he suggests, we may begin to ask a question [. . .] which in the political emergency of the 1980s and in the postapartheid phase of the 1990s was rarely asked: is this work, whether story, play or poem, not only ethically but also aesthetically, a challenging contribution to, or indeed a challenge to, the category of ‘South African Literature’ (Chapman and Lenta 2011: 13). Can we be bolder and ask questions that bring the ‘literary’ again into clear focus, without fetishising it? For example, what it was about Coetzee’s

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Disgrace, as a novel, that – as Antjie Krog suggests in Chapter 5 – enabled it to rip open debates about postapartheid identity in ways that other texts appeared not to do, so much so that it entered parliamentary discussion and even political parties ventured into the terrain of literary criticism and evaluation. So extensive was the public dialogue about this novel that literary critics now talk of the ‘post-Disgrace’ period. While Coetzee’s novel is concerned with, among other things, the question of white identity and belonging in postapartheid South Africa, and so is profoundly ‘political’ in the larger sense, it is also extremely ‘personal’ in the emotional confusion and anguish it explores. As Chapman noted above, in postapartheid South Africa, public acclaim in the form of literary awards, reviews and sales has been drawn especially by ‘books tangential to heavy politics’, and he emphasises the way in which some of the recent South African texts he discusses are concerned with ‘how to connect’. In an article I wrote some years ago, titled ‘National Belonging and Cultural Difference: South Africa and the Global Imaginary’ (Brown 2001), I made an argument about a mutual implication in a history of difference, citing Frantz Fanon’s assertion that the colonised and coloniser know each other intimately. That intimacy, of course, involves extraordinary levels of coercion and is marked by the politics of authority and subjugation. At its most brutal, such intimacy is evident in the relationship of torturer and tortured, though its spectrum runs through to the apparently more benign, though nevertheless oppressive, relationship of black domestic workers with the white families for whom they work, especially in the intimacies that develop between them and the children they help to raise. Without denying the continuing economic and political legacies of apartheid, I would agree with Chapman that the desire to connect, to identify, to establish intimacy, as an act of volition rather than coercion is increasingly evident in the texts that find resonance across and beyond South Africa. By this I do not mean any kind of rainbow nationalism. The connections may not be easy, or politically correct, or even particularly directed at overcoming social division, but they are compelling attempts at seeking or establishing intimacy. One of the narrators of Njabulo S. Ndebele’s extraordinary novel-cum-philosophical essay, The Cry of   Winnie Mandela, makes the point very eloquently:

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Can there be any society without private lives – without homes wherein individuals can flourish through histories of intimacy? Intimacy? A dangerous word. It has the South African capacity to imply the extremes of banality or profundity. Yet, when we gave up the AK-47 for negotiation, we opted for intimacy. In the choice we had between negotiation and revolutionary violence we opted for feelings and the intellect. We committed ourselves to posing questions and researching them for solutions. We opted for complexity, ambiguity, nuance, and emergent order. We opted for the uncertainties of experiencing one another. In this new universe, we may come to terms with the disturbing truth that both friends and enemies of yesterday may no longer be taken for granted (2003: 71). In its imaginative affinities and projections, its emphasis on affect as well as argument, the literary is particularly well suited to explorations of ‘feeling and intellect’, ‘the uncertainties of experiencing one another’, of the ‘banality or profundity’ of incipient intimacies. Little wonder that it is flourishing as a genre in South Africa: as literature. In engaging with these three worthwhile studies and their implications for the field of South African literary study, I find myself thinking towards a literary scholarship that is more comfortable with the unpredictability, contrariness and unruliness of the literary; that is not embarrassed by the affective, nor feels the need to bracket it off or explain its ‘functionality’; that deploys theory as it is useful, rather than being disciplined by it or – worse – using ‘theory’ to discipline ‘literature’. I am thinking about a scholarship that is less monumental and institutionally proclaimed; that is instead more nimble and also more humble; that is less sure about its own grounds of working and its aims, but is clear that there is a great deal at stake – the very notions of what it means to be human, humane, civil, compassionate. It is a mode of reading, thinking – living – that is potentially more attuned to the vicious, beautiful, transnational, parochial, hopeful, hopelessly betrayed place that is postapartheid South Africa.

Finding My Way 47  CHAPTER TWO

Reimagining the ‘Literary’

Necessarily negotiating the shadow of its own impossibility, then, this essay had better get under way. — Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper and Craig MacKenzie, The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945

‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness’ In the previous chapter I argued that most of the attention to the probing question Leon de Kock asked in 2005, ‘Does South African literature still exist?’, had focused more on the qualifier ‘South African’ and less on the noun ‘literature’. It remains a powerful question – deceptively simple, but concealing in its formulation several depth charges: questions of literary value; modes of reading; literary historiography; national/transnational identities; translation; readership; institutional location; and so on. In this chapter, I concentrate more on the notion of the ‘literary’ in literary studies in universities in South Africa (and elsewhere). It is to me perhaps the most challenging aspect of De Kock’s question. A relatively conventional position on literature and literary value is the kind that Simon Gikandi, for example, put forward at a workshop on ‘Contemporary Debates in Literary and Cultural Studies’ at Makerere University in Uganda, which I attended in 2011. He insisted that there was a necessary connection between the category of ‘literature’ and its institutional location and support: A body of texts becomes literature through a process of institutionalisation. The resulting corpus is then contained within disciplinary practices and boundaries including the law of genre, linguistic and historical traditions, and interpretative practices. These disciplinary constraints also inform other disciplines, so 47

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literature is not unique in this respect. Where literature seems different is in its total dependence on institutions for its identity and function (Gikandi 2011: 4; my emphasis). He continued: ‘Then there is the practice of reading itself. Ordinary readers do read works of prose and poetry, but it is only in the hands of specialised readers, within institutions such as the school or the review, that these works become literature’ (Gikandi 2011: 4). While I agree that notions of value and canonicity have a strong institutional grounding – for me probably the simplest and most cogent definition of canonicity is ‘what gets taught’ – I am not sure that Gikandi is correct in asserting so directly literature’s ‘total dependence on institutions for its identity and function’, or certainly not ‘institutions’ understood in the conventional, historical sense. In South Africa, in 2020, we seem to have the opposite: literature is flourishing, while academic criticism is floundering. In this chapter I probe some possible reasons for this. Literary studies is routinely referred to as a discipline in crisis, in many cases manifesting a condition that is apparently terminal. Gikandi, for example, said at the workshop referred to above that literature is ‘now considered to be a dying discipline’ (2011: 1). There have been several books in this vein, the titles of which suggest a crisis in the discipline – for example, Josephine Guy and Ian Small’s Politics and Value in English Studies: A Discipline in Crisis (1993), Eugene Goodheart’s Does Literary Studies Have a Future? (1999) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003). It should be noted, though, both that such studies usually end up arguing for the importance and continued life of the discipline and that, despite dire predictions to the contrary, we are still teaching and writing about literature. As Terry Eagleton demonstrates in Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), the history of English studies is precisely a series of transformations and crises (if truth be told, probably the same could be said about most disciplines, in particular anthropology and history). I do not see literature as in any way a ‘dying’ discipline, if that means a drop in student enrolments, a loss of institutional support or a downturn in research outputs. Perhaps the situation looks different in the United States and in parts of Africa, but work with colleagues across universities in South Africa and the United Kingdom tells a different

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story (though I admit the situation of the humanities as a whole in the United Kingdom is decidedly uncertain). If Gikandi means that literature is increasingly an interdiscipline, which is suffering from dispersal, then I would agree, as argued in the previous chapter, and I do think there are some serious problems to be dealt with. Some reflection on the recent constitution of the discipline may be helpful in making sense of its current and future trajectories, particularly in understanding why South African literary studies seems, as De Kock suggests, to be so far behind the game (2005: 77). The reasons are no doubt multiple, including the complexities of negotiating the unstable terrain of the postapartheid and the transnational, the rapid expansion of cultural, media and communication studies, the proliferation of electronic publishing and social media platforms, and so on. But I would point to a more fundamental problem: a discomfort with the very notion of the literary or the judgement of literary value. Since at least the mid-1980s, South African literary criticism, partly under the influence of Marxism, poststructuralism, poststructural Marxism, deconstruction and critical theory, has retreated from the literary and more broadly the aesthetic, which – in the absence of a compelling social subject like apartheid or colonialism – leaves it singularly unable to deal with the complexities of a context in which literature as literature is flourishing. So I am suggesting a reimagining or reinstatement of the notion of the ‘literary’ in critical discussion. I am not so foolish as to attempt a definition of the literary: as several theorists have noted, any attempt to do so tells one more about the specific aesthetic assumptions of the author, context and period than suggesting anything global or general about literature. But, as Eagleton says, ‘If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur, “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary’ (1983: 2). Eagleton himself does not define what it is about the line from John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ that announces itself as ‘literary’ beyond a passing comment about ‘excess meaning’, and perhaps he is right, because the ‘literary’ is something that it seems can only be seen from the side of the eye: like the concept of nation, it disappears under direct scrutiny, though it remains a persistent, if shadowy, presence.

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As I have said, English studies has since its inception been a discipline in crisis, so to suggest that we currently have problems is hardly a dramatic revelation. While a ‘retreat’ from the literary is a global phenomenon in literary studies, part of the problem in South Africa lies in the specific way in which South African literary studies constituted its project in the 1980s and 1990s. It is perhaps most boldly, or baldly, stated by Michael Chapman in Southern African Literatures. He says near the beginning of the book that his project is primarily a political one; that he reads the literature for its stance against injustice and consequently ‘brackets off’ the question of literary value (1996: 4). Like the heady times described by Gikandi (2011) in Nairobi in the late 1960s, during which the proponents of African literature were in pitched battle against defenders of the European and American canon, in South Africa the 1980s and 1990s were exciting times to be part of a literature department (especially in English, Afrikaans or African literature). We had a sense that the stakes were high: no less than opposition to injustice and the defeat of racism. Each issue of the Southern African Review of Books and the book pages of the Weekly Mail or Vrye Weekblad were eagerly awaited and devoured. De Kock says of that period: In the hothouse environment created by enforced isolation under apartheid, literature and publishing flourished under crisis. Our writers [and critics, I would add] could take on a sense of grave importance by virtue of writing in and about one of the great crisis points in the world. South Africa had become one of the world’s grand allegories of racial strife, of the struggle for justice and truth in the wake of successive waves of imperial, colonial and neocolonial rule (2005: 75). These were the times when our bibliographies were littered with references to Ravan Press, rather than Routledge; the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), rather than Cambridge. My question is about the (unintended?) legacy of this criticism of crisis: What writers did it bring to the fore? What writers did it neglect? Is a different literary historiography desirable/possible? And what modes of (re)reading and evaluating might prove more enabling in our current contexts?

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Rendering the literary invisible? Something of the earnest historical materialism of the time is reflected in Martin Trump’s very influential edited volume, Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture (1990), published, indeed, by Ravan Press. It was virtually a handbook at the time for anyone who worked in the field of South African literature with an ear attuned to literary theory, and being included in it seemed to signal that one had ‘arrived’ as a scholar of the new generation.1 But it makes for intriguing and rather curious reading from the perspective of 2020. In particular, its sense that it was radically oppositional in orientation reads somewhat ironically now, as the approach it advocated rapidly became a critical orthodoxy of its own. Here is a sample from Trump’s introduction: Similar processes of repressive concealment characterise, at less brutal and extreme levels, most literature departments in the country. Rory Ryan speaks of institutionalised literary studies in South Africa as being dominated by a humanist agenda which ‘dovetails with the ideals and activities of a civilised and civilising colonial patriarchy’. He goes on to suggest that ‘the institutionalisation of an imperialist discursive form under the guise of a neutral (objective, truth-serving, self-evident, ideologically disinterested) rationality is the source of current social power in the South African academy’ (1990: xii). Trump’s introduction is haunted by the questions he poses at the outset: ‘In a country as inexorably politicised as South Africa today, why should the study of the country’s literature compel our interest? What special claims can one make for literary studies in such a context?’ (1990: x). For Trump, the answer lies in discourse theory and semiotics, in that literature ‘open[s] up [. . .] a broad discursive area’: the ‘hybrid polysemic discourse of literature includes and might even be said to enlarge the epistemological realm of other discourses’. While (tentatively) defending the study of literature, this argument expresses a profound wariness of 1. I remember a conversation at a conference in which my interlocutor expressed distinct umbrage at not having been asked to contribute.

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‘the literary’, in fact of the very discipline of ‘literary studies’. Trump refers to a ‘potential contradiction’, namely, that while there is an interplay of different discourses in literature, literature appears to be distinguishable as a discourse having its own characteristics. This is an area of intense debate within materialist criticism. The kind of questions that have been raised take the form of: does one admit to the existence of ‘literariness’ (a set of distinguishing codes within literature)? That is, is there such a discipline as literary studies – separate and legitimate (1990: xi)? The answer provided by Trump, via Dirk Klopper, is that literature is inserted ‘within a complex socio-cultural terrain’, rather than being ‘an apparently autonomous practice’: ‘Materialist criticism clearly rejects what Dirk Klopper calls in his essay the “ultimately idealist binary system” which opposes the socio-political with the literary, where the former is viewed as “the material exteriority of a mystifying interiority” ’ (Trump 1990: xi). And John Frow’s Marxism and Literary History (1986: 57) is yoked into the argument: Because it is not possible to appeal to any form of reality outside the discursive, ‘the decisive criterion of analysis can thus no longer be the relation between discourse and a reality which is external to it [. . .] Instead, the relevant criterion is that of the relations between discourse and power, the intrication of power in discourse’ (Trump 1990: xi). Leaving aside the larger question of whether the argument that ‘it is not possible to appeal to any form of reality outside the discursive’ simply returns us to the pointless (and painful) activity of kicking rocks to see if anything exists outside of our perception of it, the kind of argument articulated by Trump and others places literature in a position entirely subordinate to its own critical discourse, rather than allowing that it can be a way of knowing or apprehending that may talk back to, and interrogate, some of the orthodoxies of the critical language that attempts

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to ‘discipline’ it. Ironically, this position refuses the potential unruliness or contrariness that even materialist writers like Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht found in the ‘literary’. The notion of the literary as literary, rather than something that could be read off for political context or historical information, was rather an embarrassment to many literary critics in South Africa (and elsewhere) in the 1980s and early 1990s – an indulgence or affectation. And, as I have said elsewhere, at the time it was more politically acceptable for a literary scholar to be seen attending the Wits History Workshop than, say, the annual Association of University English Teachers of Southern Africa (AUETSA) conference (Brown 2008b: 147). I have mentioned how Chapman’s Southern African Literatures, which I do nevertheless think is a fine piece of scholarship, ‘brackets off’ the problematic questions of literariness, affect, value and excess meaning in favour of a political project (to be fair to Chapman, he does take up these questions substantially in more recent work [2006, 2016; Chapman and Lenta 2011]). One could illustrate the general tendency with another mammoth tome: anyone reading Robert J.C. Young’s book Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) would find little in it to identify Young as a literary scholar. In this respect, I have often thought that Fredric Jameson’s controversial comment about ‘Third World literature’ being always a national allegory is perhaps more accurate an observation about the criticism of this literature than the creative work itself (1986). Under the influence of cultural studies, especially its Marxist-driven forms, the flattening of the ‘literary’ into textuality again led, in its cruder manifestations, to an inability to engage with questions such as what it is that Mongane Wally Serote’s novel To Every Birth Its Blood (1981) is doing as a novel, rather than as an allegory of national history, a crude turning of narrative strategy into political argument, or a mythological obfuscation of social praxis (see, for example, Sole [1991] and Visser [1987]). High theory, in particular poststructuralism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis, as evident in article after article in, for example, the Journal of Literary Studies, tended to adduce the literary, especially novels (the marginalisation of poetry in the long history of these debates has been noted by many scholars), to illustrate the arguments of theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel

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Levinas or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with the first two-thirds of the article expounding the theory, which was then ‘applied’ to the novel, with the novel supposedly under discussion never being allowed to talk back to or interrogate the theory. An easy and apparently entirely effective way of dismissing an argument was to declare it ‘insufficiently theorised’. Being a literary scholar at this time was a little like going to gym under the instruction of an overly assiduous personal trainer and being told that ‘you need to spend much more time on the theoretical apparatus’. (Chapman wrote a memorable review of Teresa Dovey’s book on J.M. Coetzee, which he subtitled ‘On Reading Dovey on Reading Lacan on Reading Coetzee on Reading . . . (?)’ [1988b].) Chapman quotes Louise Bethlehem on the problems with this approach: She notes with regret that the swing to textuality in the 1990s led to the large abstractions of continental philosophy being applied, too often without precision or adjustment, to the subjective experience of the particular author’s texts. A consequence was that J. M. Coetzee began to function ‘virtually by default, as a convenient point of reference through which to hone by-now predictable aspects of the postcolonial [one might equally say, poststructural or postmodern] theory in its metropolitan guises’ (Chapman 2009: 13). Underpinning all of this was a movement – which made good sense at the time – from a discipline based on an object of study (great books, constituting a canon) to one defined by its modes of reading. Gikandi, for example, talks of the critical historical moment in Kenya when three lecturers called for the displacement of English literature from the centre of the curriculum (2011: 1). Certainly, deconstruction of the canon was a healthy and productive development, unmasking a series of hubristic, patronising, often crassly racist and sexist assumptions about knowledge, value(s) and cultures, which were bound up with processes of empire, colonisation, subjugation and the maintenance of relations of political and economic inequality. But it is also true that – as long as literature is taught at schools and universities – the creation of canons is inescapable, since, as noted above, canonicity is bound up with what ends up being

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taught. It would now be hard to describe Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) or Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) as anything but canonical texts. Retaining the notion of canonicity, in a partial, contingent, contextually specific way, makes it difficult to bracket off or sidestep the hard questions about ‘literariness’ and ‘value’. I agree with Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell, who says: Even today it is impossible to use the term ‘literature’ without implying some relation to value judgement, and its meaning in everyday usage is openly honorific. To deny this fact merely produces an effect of assumed innocence, different from, but no more plausible than, the ideological equivocations of the bourgeois canon itself (2002: 9). In talking about reinstating the literary, or retaining some notion of canonicity, I do not mean in any way the kind of uncritical endorsement of the English canon that has remained stubbornly present in certain institutions. As argued in the previous chapter, many of the English departments with which I have engaged in South Africa and the United Kingdom suffer from a radically different problem: such dispersal under the influence of various sub-disciplines (gender studies; film studies; eco-criticism; transnational studies; media studies; performance studies; digital literacies; and so on) that it is difficult for academics teaching students at more senior levels to have a clear sense of what the students actually know (Gerald Graff’s ‘cafeteria model’ taken to the extreme [1990]). Recent emphases in literary studies on ‘histories of the book’ may offer some way of rethinking the ‘literary’, especially the versions that engage with reception theory, but their emphasis on circuits of production and consumption can also simply be a means to bracket off the book as something valued as literature. Acknowledging the problems with the term ‘literature’, Peter Widdowson nevertheless argues in his book simply titled Literature  : For what has gone on, and continues to go on, in its sullied name, and under its tattered banner, appears to remain such a crucial component of human activity and experience that it needs to be

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rescued from itself: to be re-accredited – rather than shamefacedly subsumed, as has recently been the case, within general concepts of ‘writing’, ‘rhetoric’, ‘discourse’ or ‘cultural production’ (1999: 2). Literature, as J.M. Coetzee famously said about narrative, is like a cockroach in that it seems to survive no matter what: more literature, and I mean texts of substance and interest, is being produced, for example, at present in South Africa, than at any other time in our history. The historian Premesh Lalu has written about the complexities of ‘instrumental reason’ and ‘disciplinary reason’ in relation to the humanities in South Africa (2009). To my mind, there is always a necessary tension in disciplines between the instrumental and the disciplinary, for disciplines always need something for or against which to constitute themselves: the history of English studies is a history of causes. Even at its most apparently radical, poststructuralism tacitly retains as its own transcendental signified notions of human rights, gender equity, social equality, and so on, and these – I would argue – should continue to inform our readings. So, in pointing to the constitution of English studies against racism or colonialism, and the reading of texts for their destabilising or oppositional qualities, I am not arguing that this was wrong. I think it was right and necessary, and I was intimately engaged with it. My question is to do with the unintended consequences: as literary critics and literary historians, are we equipped and ready to engage with what literature is achieving and exploring as literature? Derek Attridge says in this regard that ‘literature always seems to present itself in the final analysis as something more than the category or entity it is claimed to be [. . .] and as valuable for something other than the various personal or social benefits which are ascribed to it’ (2004: 5). I would argue that we need to reimagine the discipline of English studies in ways that make it more amenable to engagement with its rebellious, challenging and captivating subject. Reimagining the literary So what might a reconstituted or reimagined discipline or mode of reading be? I would argue that it needs to lay down (some of ) the authority of its critical discourse for a humbler, more tentative and imaginative reading,

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which also allows for its own interrogation; a criticism that reads both with and against the text, rather than seeking to subdue or discipline it, and that allows that the text may (necessarily, always?) exceed the meaning(s) we make of it. But it is a critical approach that can make value judgements (though without assuming that they are absolute or disinterested), and that can suggest that some texts may be more worth the time of readers (and learners and students) than others; that can remonstrate with that which may seem simply gratuitous or offensive, while foregrounding – debating, if need be – its own grounds for making that argument. It is a criticism enabled, rather than determined, by theory. Some of the points made in this chapter so far echo those of Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper and Craig MacKenzie in their introduction to The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945 (2010), which is the most radical of the three major studies of South African literature published recently in its call for a rethinking of the literary and the evaluative in criticism. In a stand-alone piece, Cornwell himself has argued with characteristic acerbity that the emergent discipline of literary studies calling itself ‘English’ in the Anglo-American world spent the first half of the twentieth century defining its object of investigation and refining its methodology. It spent the second half of the century undermining these achievements and destroying the consensus on which they depended. Ironically for a discipline so language-centred, English’s classic misadventure was enabled by a development commonly known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities (2012: 5). ‘I doubt that the Tel Quel gang,’ he continues, ‘ever dreamed that so many scholars of literature would take their anti-realist bravado and salon sophistry so seriously, that is, as a series of accounts of how the world really is’ (Cornwell 2012: 5).2

2. Tel Quel (‘as is’ or ‘as such’) was a French avant-garde literary magazine published between 1960 and 1982.

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While I have some sympathy for Cornwell’s position, it may too easily be read as a call for a return to ‘saner’, pre-theory days. Eagleton refuses that possibility in After Theory: There can be no going back to an age when it was enough to pronounce Keats delectable or Milton a doughty spirit. It is not as though the whole project [of literary theory] was a ghastly mistake on which some merciful soul has now blown the whistle, so that we can all return to whatever it was we were doing before Ferdinand de Saussure heaved over the horizon (2003: 1–2). Eagleton enumerates the significant contributions of theory, in particular in the fields of gender and sexuality, popular culture and postcolonial studies (2003: 3–6), though he does lament some of the shortcomings too, including the fact that its hostility to concepts such as nationalism and individual identity, and its tendency to displace political debates into the realm of ‘culture’, limit its ability to accomplish actual social or economic change (1–40). He points out that if ‘theory means a reasonably systematic reflection on our guiding assumptions, it remains as indispensable as ever’ (2): in this sense, there can be no ‘after theory’. He does argue, though, ‘that we are living in the aftermath of what one might call high theory, in an age which, having grown rich on the insights of thinkers like Althusser, Barthes and Derrida, has also in some ways moved beyond them’ (2). Responding to the ‘post-high theory’ context, Cornwell proposes ‘a renewed or reinvigorated literary criticism’ (2012: 7), a ‘more worldly and adequately historicised New-ish Criticism’, which emphasises writerly reading, evaluation and aesthetics, while remaining alert to context, retaining a self-reflexiveness about critical practice and resisting the impulse to reinstate canonicity (9–10). I assume his reference to a ‘New-ish Criticism’ reflects a desire to return to the practice of close reading – encouraged by the high theorist Spivak, actually, in Death of a Discipline (2003: 6) – of engaging with what the literary text does and does not do, rather than levering it into a predetermined theoretical framework, as several critics sought to do at the height of the theory wars. ‘We must do all in our power,’ Cornwell continues,

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to discover or invent a critical language capable of conveying with cogency the affective dimension of the reader’s experience of a literary text. We also need to develop more precise and sophisticated ways of articulating the recognition of quality, invoking an idiom more creaturely than the subjective impressionism for which fine art and music criticism are so notorious (2012: 10). Connections and seams The kind of approach Cornwell gestures towards, which does not read literary texts only through their engagement with ‘big issues’, would seem appropriate to the challenges of our current postapartheid and transnational contexts. I referred in the previous chapter to Chapman’s argument that in the post-2000 period ‘books tangential to heavy politics, or even to local interest, have begun to receive national recognition’ (Chapman and Lenta 2011: 1). The examples he cites are novels that seek connection, even intimacy (sometimes brutal), in a world in which the certainties of the anti-apartheid struggle and the national formation have been fundamentally undermined, and the possibilities of identity formation are multiple, complex, shifting and by turns contradictory, liberating, frightening, dizzying and affirming. I want in this regard to return to De Kock’s argument about the ‘seam’, in which difference is insistently rending and being restitched. It remains for me one of the most compelling arguments about South African literature.3 De Kock draws the concept from Noel Mostert: To see the crisis of inscription in South Africa following colonisation in terms of the ‘seam’, I wrote, deliberately conjoining the

3. My colleague Nkosinathi Sithole suggested to me that he thought De Kock’s argument might be applicable to literature in English, but not in isiZulu, which for much of the apartheid period avoided political issues. He argues that it is only in the postapartheid era that isiZulu literature has inhabited the realm of the ‘seam’. I suspect, though, that the ‘closed circuit’ between publication in isiZulu and prescription on school syllabi meant that only ostensibly ‘apolitical’, and hence prescribable, texts made it into print. Sithole’s own problems with isiZulu publishers are recounted later in this chapter.

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literal with the figural, was to see the sharp point of the nib as a stitching instrument that seeks to suture the incommensurate. The seam, fundamentally, is therefore the site of a joining together that also bears the mark of the suture (2005: 73). The seam holds together ‘what was in reality always a fantastically diverse body of writing’ and is political ‘in the deep sense as a contest over terms of identity and forms of belonging’: The political bind was an impulse in the writing to engage with the seams of breaking and mending, of denial and counteraffirmation, of overwriting and rewriting, of splitting and splicing [. . .] This great drama, this segue of rending and reconnecting, was compellingly insistent because it derived from a battle over people’s very hearts and souls, their deepest notions of themselves, or what we have come to call in various theoretical terminologies, their identities, their subjectivities and their subject-positions (De Kock 2005: 71). Being a South African writer meant ‘inhabitation of the seam as a deep symbolic structure’, and those who rose to global prominence ‘hit the seam directly and trenchantly, such as Coetzee, Gordimer, Paton, Mphahlele, Fugard, Brutus, Serote, Breytenbach and Brink’ (De Kock 2005: 75). But from the perspective of 2005, in asking whether ‘South African literature still exists’, De Kock questions whether a definition of a corpus of work, in terms of its engagement with the seam, provides any basis for conceptualising something called ‘South African literature’ in a postapartheid, transnational space. Constantly restitching the seam is an act of compulsive neurosis, in which the desire for unity and commonality is undone by the continued repetition of difference (one might rephrase Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous epigraph to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: ‘The condition of the South African writer is a nervous condition’). Chapman, however, argues that while literary and cultural studies of the 1990s in South Africa ‘sought to cope with difference [. . .] the current priority might be how to connect in a society which at the same time is alert to the “transnational”

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perspective of Anne Landsman’s The Rowing Lesson and the “indigeneity” ’ of Thando Mgqolozana’s A Man Who Is Not a Man (Chapman and Lenta 2011: 12) – the former offering a narrative of a return ‘home’ to visit a dying father, and the latter recounting a botched circumcision in Xhosa initiation practice. I mentioned earlier Chapman’s comment that post2000 ‘books tangential to heavy politics, or even to local interest, have begun to receive national recognition’ (1), or even, one might add, books with few South African referents. In 2013 it was especially a novel like Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls, centring on a serial killer in the United States, which substantially entered public discourse, to the extent that the author even featured on media shows that seldom – if ever – mention books (such as on the music station 5FM) and on social media, where, for example, Beukes mentioned that Stephen King had commented positively on her novel. De Kock’s metaphor of the seam is drawn from sewing – the seam is that which holds two pieces of fabric together – or from surgery, in which sutures close a wound. The tear, join or wound reflects the line along which some sort of putative commonality is imagined and reimagined, despite or because of the constant tendency to tear or pull asunder: it is the constant return to ‘the drama of representational doubleness, created in the clasp of denial and misnaming, of repression and false singularity’ (2005: 75). Seams, of course, are found in rock, as well as fabric and skin, and much of South Africa’s economy involves the subterranean pursuit of multiple seams of gold, platinum and copper. These seams interweave, diverge, join, prove unexpectedly productive or peter out disappointingly. They permeate the substrate of rock, offering promise, but also despair. And pursuing them can literally be a matter of life and death. While acknowledging fully the historical legacies of apartheid, in particular the gross economic inequalities that remain more than 25 years after the election of the first democratic government, I would nevertheless argue that much writing from and in South Africa has moved away from the seam as join, to multiple seams – interweaving, diverging, switching back, converging – of sexuality, family relationships, death, loss, illness, home, environment, spiritualities, crime, horror, love, and so on. De Kock apparently concurs:

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If we argue that the seam of compulsive identity formation under conditions of referential fracture has been undone, then the lines of affiliation, logically, are free to go where they like. The disappearance of the obvious struggle, which contained ‘South African literature’ as we used to know it, means our struggles can now leave behind the absolute contests and grim polarities of the past. This is really a very simple point. But its implications are profound, and I am not sure that we always allow ourselves to entertain them exuberantly, joyfully enough (2005: 77). If the literature is open to these new possibilities, what about the criticism? Is South African literary studies up to the challenge of a literature of a far more complex constellation? De Kock’s stressing the ‘need to keep track of a literary industry that has become diverse and productive in the last few years – so much so that I think the academy is once again several years behind the game’ (2005: 77) suggests that, for him at least, it is not. ‘Because there is no map, only improvisational forays’ I mentioned the success in 2013 of Beukes’s novel The Shining Girls, which is apparently being made into a Hollywood film. Apart from the fact of the author’s residing in South Africa, there is nothing whatsoever in the novel to identify it as South African, set as it is in Chicago between 1931 and 1993. Yet it has been taken up in book clubs, blogs and social media in South Africa in a way that makes it very much part of the (trans) national debate about writing in South Africa.4 Transnational reach, identification and imbrication are fundamental to the constitution of the postapartheid (and the postcolonial) in ways that can indeed be liberating, although as several critics have argued, they frequently manifest in politically and economically conservative neoliberal ways. Transnational studies can lead to a ‘flattening out’ of the world, De Kock points out (2011: 22), and ‘what we might call the transnational rupture in both literary critical and imaginative writing coming out of South Africa from the early 1990s onwards was both centrifugal and centripetal, both a category-implosion as well as an outwardly liberating 4. The quote in the subheading is from De Kock (2005: 81).

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thrust’ (21). In this context, De Kock argues that there are more ‘options for being that render possible more complex constellations, more choice’, involving ‘a more liberating repertoire for the improvisation of individual identity’ (2005: 77). He continues: ‘Some of the post-2000 writers publishing out of South Africa more recently have taken this bigger space for play and improvisation to extents that make their work only incidentally “South African” in the old sense.’ The shift in De Kock’s formulation to ‘publishing out of ’, rather than ‘writing in’ is telling. To return to my central question: is South African criticism still constituted in a way that favours the unpicking or resuturing of the seam, rather than in ways that are nimble and imaginative enough to follow multiple seams that the literary is pursuing, without simply dispersing beyond recognition? De Kock’s argument in his 2005 article seems to be more about the loosening of the grip of national identities than specifically about the category of literature, though he does gesture in this direction in his account of his own reading as a ‘process of self-mapping [which] can now become more improvisational, with feeling’ (2005: 78). However, his praise for Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat seems to make some suggestions of what we might ‘read for’ in refocusing the ‘literary’ postapartheid: The novel is written with mastery of a kind that necessitates literary re-evaluation in several senses, if that is still our work: of the possibilities for probing, large-scale narrative in South African letters; of an expanded capacity for feeling [. . .] and of the recombination of form in South African narrative writing in ways that are ambitious in a big sense (De Kock 2005: 79). In considering a reimagined criticism, a key acknowledgement for the literary academy (if it can still be assumed to exist) must be that we do not any longer constitute the dominant public sphere for the commentary upon and judgement of literary texts, in the ways Gikandi assumed in the statements quoted at the beginning of this chapter, when he talked of a ‘body of texts becom[ing] literature through a process of institutionalisation’ (2011: 4). This is not to suggest that we should relinquish literary criticism or the judgement of value. On the contrary,

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at least part of the reason for the development of a more complex and diverse literary public sphere may lie in the fact that, especially at the highest point of theory, literary criticism seemed too often to be about everything but literature – and one might add, at its worst, it was comprehensible to very few. Perhaps the answer to the question of whether a healthy literature requires a healthy criticism lies in what one means by both ‘criticism’ and ‘institutions’. There is no question that literary production in South Africa is flourishing, despite the fairly dispersed, some might say impoverished, state of criticism in the academy. De Kock argues correctly that the established modes of university literary study – the scholarly journal article and university syllabus – would provide a poor guide to someone wishing to understand the state of South African literature (2011: 29). The institutions and critical voices validating and describing that literature are various, and they have relationships with the academy that range from the direct to the tenuous: reviewers, bloggers, social media feeds, talk shows, literary awards, literary festivals, websites, online discussion forums, creative writing programmes, writing fellowships, and so on. Books Live and Slipnet (the latter initiated by De Kock) are two websites of enormous value for literary scholars and readers. Someone wanting to get a grasp of recent South African literature would probably do well to follow publishers, authors or reviewers on social media, as these provide the most up-to-date information on book launches, festivals, reviews, awards, and even comments by authors about the manuscripts they are working on, with some feeds offering real-time reporting from events.5 As literary critics, we need to be far more adept and nimble in engaging with the range of sources of information and modalities of judging and attributing value, all the while remaining aware that these provide directions, rather than maps.

5. The disconnect between the academy and the new literary public sphere was starkly evident at a recent book launch, at which a social media reporter introduced herself to one of the two co-authors. After she had explained what she was doing, the somewhat bewildered author said that he would ask his co-author whether this was in order. ‘Don’t bother,’ the reporter responded. ‘It’s not your call, as your publisher hired me to do it.’

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However diverse it may have become, the public sphere of literature remains crucial in the promotion and recognition of works. There are examples of good texts – ‘good’ for me by the simple measures of whether I read them with interest, come from the encounter enriched and would consider prescribing them for a university course – which have disappeared with little trace. Johan Steyn’s novel Father Michael’s Lottery (2005) is to my mind the best novelistic treatment of HIV and AIDS on the subcontinent to date. For some reason it was not taken up in the academy in any way and its appearance pre-dated the proliferation of circuits of social media dedicated to books and publishing. Books need champions, and despite the best efforts of the publisher, the kind of ‘institutional’ support that propelled to prominence another novel from the same publishing house, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), was not forthcoming for Steyn’s book. For at least the last three decades, many departments of literature/ English in South Africa and beyond have been involved in a game of double bluff: denying or being wary of questions of literariness or the attribution of value, while at the same time tacitly assuming both literariness and value in continuing to prescribe literature, in the form of novels, plays and poems, and choosing some, not others (although I acknowledge and value the efforts of many to expand the notion of what might constitute ‘literature’ and what should fall within the purview of literary studies). Many academics have been involved in judging for literary prizes, and I agree with De Kock that literary critics would do well to engage with the longlists, shortlists and notes of the judges of literary prizes in getting a handle on literary production in South Africa (2011: 29). I would add the less visible (and perhaps less accessible), because ostensibly confidential, issue of readers’ reports for publishers. As literary critics we make key evaluative judgements not only in reading published novels, plays and poems, but also in deciding what actually makes it to publication, and often making specific (literary) recommendations for changes in style and focus to manuscripts. Far more direct intervention is evident in the burgeoning field of the teaching of creative writing at universities, of course. However much we may argue against it, we are in these processes canon builders, sometimes assiduously so.

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South African literature beyond 2000 I ended the previous chapter with this reflection: I find myself thinking towards a literary scholarship that is more comfortable with the unpredictability, contrariness and unruliness of the literary; that is not embarrassed by the affective, nor feels the need to bracket it off or explain its ‘functionality’; that deploys theory as it is useful, rather than being disciplined by it or – worse – using ‘theory’ to discipline ‘literature’. I am thinking about a scholarship that is less monumental and institutionally proclaimed; that is instead more nimble and also more humble; that is less sure about its own grounds of working and its aims, but is clear that there is a great deal at stake – the very notions of what it means to be human, humane, civil, compassionate. It is a mode of reading, thinking – living – that is potentially more attuned to the vicious, beautiful, transnational, parochial, hopeful, hopelessly betrayed place that is postapartheid South Africa. I want to conclude this chapter by pointing to some texts with which such a criticism might engage. My comments are intended to be suggestive, rather than exhaustive. As several critics have written on the explosion of South African crime fiction,6 I will not comment on this genre here, other than to say that for the sheer pleasure of following a well-crafted narrative Deon Meyer and Mike Nicol are superb, and that I find Margie Orford’s literary exploration of sexuality and gender violence consistently compelling. In his introduction to SA Lit: Beyond 2000 Chapman mentions a number of works as examples of literature that have resonated with readers since 2000 and received attention in terms of awards. They are written in English by authors who (with the exception of Imraan Coovadia) are 6. See, for example, Elizabeth Fletcher’s Master’s thesis (2013), the special issue of Current Writing, edited by Sam Naidu (2013), the book A Survey of South African Crime Fiction: Critical Analysis and Publishing History by Sam Naidu and Elizabeth le Roux (2017) and Leon de Kock’s Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing (2016).

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white. But the post-2000 literary terrain is more complex and challenging than that suite of novels might suggest. One of the most moving and illuminating narratives I have read recently is Nkosinathi Sithole’s Hunger Eats a Man (2015), which was first self-published in both English and isiZulu. Sithole narrates the reality of daily hunger and its devastating effects on a community in ways that accord fully with Njabulo S. Ndebele’s argument in the essay ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary’ about exploring the drama of everyday life (2015). Hunger is an almost tangible presence in Sithole’s novel and the ending, which points to the social upheaval and devastation that flow from a failure to engage with so basic an issue, resonates powerfully and unnervingly in contemporary South Africa. Sithole resorted to self-publication because the isiZulu manuscript was rejected by publishers on the grounds of obscenity, as it includes an incident of masturbation.7 The English version was later published by Penguin on the advice of Antjie Krog (books need champions) and in June 2016 was awarded the Sunday Times Literary Fiction Award. Criticism needs to be able to make ethical as well as literary judgements – if the categories can indeed be separated – and in stark contrast to Sithole’s novel is Kgebetli Moele’s novel The Book of the Dead (2009). The novel is narrated in part by the AIDS virus, and presents one of the most repellent protagonists I have yet encountered, Khutso, a rags-to-nouveau-riche lawyer, with an ability to seduce women so extraordinary that one of them, a total stranger to him, literally throws her underwear at him as he is driving alongside her. Khutso sets out to infect as many women as he can before he dies, including a twelve-yearold girl, and records their details in his ‘Book of the Dead’. While I assume Moele is presenting the narrative diagnostically, rather than endorsing the behaviour, there is no space in the narrative for any position other than Khutso’s aggressive fatalism. South African literature beyond 2000 is not for the faint-hearted. Johann Rossouw’s novel Verwoerdburg (2014), published in Afrikaans and not yet available in English translation, is a moving and evocative account of a generation of young white Afrikaners. They are too old 7. Personal communication with the author.

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to be of the born-free generation, and to forge an identity in the more open spaces of the postapartheid and transnational; but they are also too young to have an affinity for the apartheid-era Verwoerdburg. So they are socially, politically and existentially adrift in a world both familiar and unfamiliar. I have mentioned the tendency for postapartheid literary texts to seek connection. In this novel, connection is continually sought, placed and displaced. Athol Fugard’s play, Die Laaste Karretjiegraf (2013), written with the anthropologist Riana Steyn whose fieldwork on the remnants of the nomadic coloured sheep-shearing community Fugard drew on, seeks to narrate the experiences of people for whom this mode of living is rapidly coming to an end. It is also Fugard’s first play entirely in Afrikaans (rather disconcertingly, when I saw the play at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town, there were electronic signboards translating the dialogue into English). The white female anthropologist actually becomes a character in the play and passes moral judgement on one of the other characters. Fugard has for many years been South Africa’s foremost playwright, and his plays continue to be produced across the globe to critical acclaim. This play, however, may raise a different set of questions, of another conceptual order, especially about the narration of the white female anthropologist and her moral positioning in the play. Whether one thinks the play is a success or not, the issues of mediation, authority, subjection, speaking/ speaking for and the responsibilities (or not) of aesthetic work have seldom been so starkly evident on a South African stage. In her short story collection This Place I Call Home (2010), and in her novel Zebra Crossing (2013), Meg Vandermerwe deliberately sets out to ‘write the other’ as a literary and ethical imperative. Imagining the intimate feelings and thoughts of characters or narrators ‘other’ to oneself has been a contested strategy in South African, and more broadly postcolonial, literary studies. For Vandermerwe, it is fundamental in seeking new ways to write something as complex as ‘this place we call home’. In this narrative work she comes close to what Spivak identifies as the proper work of ‘old fashioned Comp. Lit.’, ‘the irreducible work of translation, not from language to language but from body to ethical semiosis, that incessant shuttle that is a “life” ’ (2003: 13).

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In her most recent novel, The Woman of the Stone Sea (2019), Vandermerwe ventures into the terrain of magical realism, with the narrative of a black mermaid washing up (alive) in a West Coast fishing village and her relationship with a coloured fisherman. It sounds an unlikely narrative, even for magical realism, but it is exquisitely handled, tracing the narratives of Xhosa mamlambo figures and Western mermaids through Khoisan and Christian beliefs, over the grittily sandy realist base of a man scratching out a living along an unforgiving coastline, while grimly and resolutely drinking himself to death in grief over his departed wife.8 Several South African authors post-2000 locate themselves in the interstices of voice and genre. Extremely well known in this respect are the creative non-fiction narratives of Jonny Steinberg and Antjie Krog, as they seek to make sense of the postapartheid terrain. Less well known, perhaps, is the work of Julia Martin (2008), to whom I referred in the introduction. Writing across the genres of the traditional essay, literary non-fiction and the academic article, she explores the complexities of place, belonging, narrative and ecology. Then there is the extraordinary narrative work undertaken by Antjie Krog, Kopano Ratele and Nosisi Mpolweni, in recreating meaning across linguistic, cultural, ontological and epistemological fractures in their account of Mrs Konile’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimony in the book There Was This Goat (2009). Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog (2004) should probably be required reading for anyone working on a South African university campus. Here is the opening of Chapter 9: On a Friday afternoon in the last week of June I sat on the steps outside the Great Hall. The weak winter sun had failed to break through the scattered cloud. I had been basking in the patchy sunlight for forty minutes contemplating what my next step should be. I knew that I had my work cut out. 8. A mamlambo is ‘a female water spirit, usually in the form of a snake or a woman requiring sacrifice, sometimes of human life, in return for her favour’. Dictionary of South African English, https://dsae.co.za/entry/mamlambo/e04522.

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It had all started the week before when I had gone to the exam room badly prepared (Mhlongo 2004: 182). The novel’s evocation of financial scrabbling, ducking and diving through apparently impenetrable and impassive university bureaucracy, late-night, alcohol-fuelled intellectual arguments, disaffection with and alienation from lecturing staff, and sheer dedication to succeed read from the perspective of 2020 as a clear forewarning of the conditions that would lead to the student protests on South African university campuses in 2015 and 2016. Venturing further afield into southern Africa, specifically Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwean diaspora into Harare North (London), Brian Chikwava’s novel Harare North (2009) is a fascinating, evocative account of diasporic life inside and outside the law through the darkly comedic, spiritedly and creatively dialected accounts of the unnamed narrator, and the characters who occupy the squat with him, or with whom he interacts through work or loose associations of friends and family. Zoë Wicomb’s October (2014) is for me a novel that opens debates about home, place and belonging in extraordinarily new ways. The temporary return of the protagonist Mercia from Glasgow to the family home in Kliprand in the Klein Namaqualand occasions reflections on the existential pain of the remembered place and the potential alienation of memory. The shifting narrative perspective between the academic Mercia and her sister-in-law Sylvie unsettles easy ethical judgement. While I am not necessarily convinced by the ending of the novel, which seems rather underwhelming and a little improbable, reading this book has suggested to me different ways of thinking about a subject that has animated me for much of my professional life as an academic: identity, place and belonging, and the meaning(s) of the remembered locale. And then there is probably the most exciting and innovative initiative in South African literature for several decades, one with which I am still engaging, so I can only register it here, but must leave analysis for another publication: the translation or retranslation of eight major literary works in African languages into English. The project was funded by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and co-ordinated by Antjie Krog through the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities

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Research at the University of the Western Cape. The series is published by Oxford University Press. Translators include Thokozile Mabeqa, Nosisi Mpolweni, Thenjiswa Ntwana, Nakanjani G. Sibiya, Nkosinathi Sithole, Biki Lepota, Tšepiso Samuel Mothibi, Stephen Masote, Koos Oosthuysen, Fred Khumalo, David wa Maahlamela, Gabeba Baderoon, Loyiso Mletshe, Zukile Jama, Ncedile Saule, Rita Barnard, Seleka Tembani, Lucy Ndlovu, J.M. Lenake and Antjie Krog. Titles published thus far are The Lawsuit of the Twins and Don Jadu by S.E.K. Mqhayi; No Matter When by B.W. Vilakazi; Home Is Nowhere by M.J. Mngadi; She’s to Blame by B.M. Khaketla; Senkatana by S.M. Mofokeng; Tears of the Brain by O.K. Motsepe and Stitching a Whirlwind: An Anthology of Southern African Poems and Translations. Along with the impressive series of Xhosa texts translated by Jeff Opland, with Wandile Kuse, Pamela Maseko and Peter Mtuze, which includes work by William Wellington Gqoba, D.L.P. Yali-Manisi, John Solilo, S.E.K. Mqhayi and Nontsizi Mgqwetho (the subject of the next chapter), the Oxford series offers us the opportunity to read with some insight across literary traditions and intellectual histories and discover, as I am already doing in my brief acquaintance with some of these texts, to what extent many of them foreshadow or address directly debates and questions that we have hubristically assumed are of our making or time. Spivak says in Death of a Discipline : ‘If as teachers of literature we teach reading, literature can be our teacher as well as our object of investigation’ (2003: 23). I come away from reading the texts discussed above by turns challenged, gratified, questioning, satisfied, uneasy, and always decidedly informed, in all the complexity of the meaning of that word. And I am reminded that, as much as theory and criticism, literature is a way of knowing, and we need to read, teach it and write about it as such.

Finding My Way 73  CHAPTER THREE

Reading ‘With’

In a perceptive article about the lives of women saints, Hilary Mantel (2004) poses the question about one of them, Gemma Galgani: ‘When you look at her strange life, you wonder what kind of language you can use to talk about her – through which discipline will you approach her?’ Further on in her discussion, she says: You have to look the saints in the face; say how the facts of their lives revolt and frighten you, but when you have got over being satirical and atheistical, and saying how silly it all is, the only productive way is the one the psychologist Pierre Janet recommended, early in the 20th century: first you must respect the beliefs that underlie the phenomena (Mantel 2004). Taking up Mantel’s challenge, in this chapter I consider how one might approach the apparently singular figure of Nontsizi Mgqwetho, a Xhosa woman who produced an extraordinary series of Christian izibongo (praise poems) in newspapers in the 1920s: through what kind of language, from what critical perspective, might one think and write about her; how does one understand her, account for her, give an account of her? There have been various attempts to write about Mgqwetho, including my own in another book (Brown 2006), and there are certain obvious possibilities in terms of approach and methodology, which I explore briefly, but I want to suggest a mode of reading that I think provides a richer, more engaged and more engaging understanding – one that reads with and through, rather than onto or against, her African-Christian articulations. Mgqwetho was a Xhosa poet who published between 1920 and 1929 in the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu (The People’s Spokesman). She is one of the first black woman poets to have produced a substantial body of work: 95 poems and 3 articles appeared between 23 October 1920 73

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and 4 September 1926. Two more poems appeared after a two-year gap on 22 December 1928 and 5 January 1929. Her work was discovered by Jeff Opland in its archival locations, and he edited and translated the poems (with assistance from Phyllis Ntantala, Abner Nyamende and Peter Mtuze), which he published in the volume The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho (Mgqwetho 2007).1 Something of the concerns of her work is suggested in an early poem: Mercy, woman poet, wing of Africa. Make way! Ach, I was used. Mercy, starling perched in a fig tree, your poems dispense with feminine wiles. Mercy, Nontsizi, African moss, let old maids screen their bodies in bodices for no one knows your ancestors: without skin skirts there’ll be no weddings. Where are your daughters? What do you say? ‘We roamed the countryside searching for marriage, we turned our backs on home and dowry, today we’re exploited in exile homes.’ What’s education? Where are your sons? They roamed the land in search of niks, chickens scratching for scraps, eager at dawn, at dusk empty-handed. Mercy, Nontsizi, striped gold-breasted bunting that piped its prophecies through the thornbrakes; Awu! Mercy, poetic diviner, watch out, the wild bird’s flapping its wings (Mgqwetho 2007: 78).

1. I have discussed Opland’s translation strategy elsewhere (Brown 2006).

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What little we know of Mgqwetho’s life is based largely on her writings.2 In a poem about the death of her mother, published on 2 December 1922, she gives her mother’s name as Emmah Jane Mgqwetto, daughter of Zingelwa of the Cwerha clan, and associates her with the Hewu district near Queenstown. Abner Nyamende, who discussed the translation of some of the poems with Opland, claims that there are Moravian liturgical influences in her poetry, which may suggest that she was educated in the Eastern Cape by the Moravians, probably at Shiloh, which is in the Hewu district (Opland 1998: 333), though I suggest there appear to be stronger African Methodist Episcopal (AME) influences in her life and work. She seems to have lived at Peddie (the site of an AME church), possibly at Tamara, as she is – according to Opland – the likely author of two prose contributions to the King William’s Town newspaper Imvo zabaNtsundu (African Opinion) on 20 May and 14 October 1897, both signed with her clan name Cizama, and the second piece coming from Tamara. In a poem that appeared in Umteteli wa Bantu on 18 December 1920 she criticises L.T. Mvabaza, editor of the newspaper Abantu-Batho (People), for bragging that he had brought her from Peddie to Johannesburg. Her first poem in Umteteli wa Bantu, published on 23 October 1920, was signed with her clan name Cizama and sent from Crown Mines in Johannesburg. From a reference to herself in a poem – ‘ungainly girl with ill-shaped frame. / Awu, Nontsizi, African moss, / with bow-legs like yours you’ll never marry!’ (Mgqwetho 2007: 78) – it seems she may have been unmarried, although the hyperbolic and intertextual nature of Xhosa personal praises means that such references may not be literally true. Mgqwetho’s poems suggest that she was socially and politically active, although she was critical of the African National Congress (ANC) for what she perceived to be its role in dividing black opposition. She defended and promoted the first editor of Umteteli wa Bantu, Marshall Maxeke, and his wife, civil rights activist Charlotte Maxeke; she appears to have been arrested for political activity – ‘I blundered in going to whites: / Oh 2. The biographical information that follows has been gleaned from Opland’s biographical summary (in Mgqwetho 2007), as well as from my own close readings of the poems and articles.

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I felt the cops’ cuffs on me!’ (Mgqwetho 2007: 78) – and took part in the April 1919 demonstration against passes in Johannesburg (referred to in a prose contribution published on 13 December 1924). She was a firm supporter and probably a member of a women’s prayer group (manyano), and also active in the temperance movement. * * * One can approach the work of Nontsizi Mgqwetho in a variety of ways. Opland’s concern is to situate her within a Xhosa literary and social history, which his own substantial scholarship has helped to unearth. He says: The poetry she left immediately claims for her the status of one of the greatest literary artists ever to write in Xhosa, an anguished voice of an urban woman confronting male dominance, ineffective leadership, black apathy, white malice and indifference, economic exploitation and a tragic history of nineteenth-century territorial and cultural dispossession (in Mgqwetho 2007: xiv). He has less to say about the religious nature of her work, other than to suggest that her Christian belief and espousal of Xhosa tradition produced a radical self-division or alienation – he refers to her as a ‘torn Christian’ and a ‘stranger in town’ (1998: 195, 208) – a reading that I think is erroneous. He also comments that her poetry is ‘refreshingly – and sadly – modern’ (in Mgqwetho 2007: xxxvi), apparently both in the nature of its address to urban dislocations and its abandonment or modification of traditional Xhosa poetic structures. One of the other people to have written on Mgqwetho is, intriguingly, former South African president Thabo Mbeki. In his regular column in ANC Today in 2007 he presented Mgqwetho as a pioneering Xhosa intellectual, especially concerned with unity and nation-building. Although the relevant section of the column is titled ‘A Thunderous Woman’s Voice’, Mbeki does not mention gender issues, but instead includes a poem Mgqwetho produced about political division (the column appeared about two months before the 2007 Polokwane

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conference at which Jacob Zuma ousted Mbeki as ANC president), and notes: ‘In rage, she spoke of responsible leadership, which should not use the masses of the people as sacrificial lambs’ (Mbeki 2007). Despite the biblical nature of his own phrasing – and, as Gerald West (2009) has shown, his own frequent use of the Bible in speeches – Mbeki makes no mention of Mgqwetho’s Christian faith. In contrast to this more secular/nationalist approach, and in view of her considerable interest in reading the Bible (of which more below), one might wish to approach Mgqwetho’s work from the perspective of the field of postcolonial biblical scholarship. One of the pioneers of the field, Musa W. Dube, outlines its concerns as follows: Post-colonial readings of the Bible must seek to decolonise the biblical text, its interpretations, its readers, its institutions, as well as seeking ways of reading for liberating interdependence. Liberating interdependence here entails a twofold willingness on the part of readers: first to propound biblical readings that decolonise imperialistic tendencies and other oppressive narrative designs; second, to propound readings that seek to highlight the biblical texts and Jesus as undoubtedly important cultures, which are, nonetheless, not ‘above all’ but among the many important cultures of the world (1998: 133). Kwok Pui-lan’s exposition of a specifically postcolonial feminist interpretation of the Bible might also provide a model: ‘A postcolonial feminist interpretation of the Bible needs to investigate the deployment of gender in the narration of identity, the negotiation of power differentials between the colonizers and the colonized, and the reinforcement of patriarchal control over spheres where these elites could exercise control’ (2005: 9). She refers to ‘two exciting books [. . . which] demonstrate the complex and multiaxial reading strategies such an interpretation requires’ – Gale Yee’s Poor Banished Children of Eve: Women as Evil in the Hebrew Bible (2003) and Dube’s Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (2000). The problems with these approaches for me, and their limitations in finding a more adequate way of reading someone like Mgqwetho, lie in the apparent assumptions that such readings must be authored (at

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least initially) by postcolonial theologians, rather than ordinary readers: such studies indicate what postcolonial subjects should be doing, rather than what they are doing. In fact, postcolonial/feminist biblical readings may be substantially at odds with readings ‘on the ground’. Someone like Mgqwetho, and I suspect many African Christians today, would probably disagree strongly with Dube’s assertion that ‘the biblical texts and Jesus’ are ‘not “above all” ’, but simply ‘among the many important cultures of the world’ (1998: 133) – an assertion that speaks of religious pluralism (rather than religious tolerance, which I suspect they would support). While the need for such directed and prescriptive rereading strategies may be understandable, given the implication of Christianity and biblical discourse in apartheid, colonial and patriarchal histories, I want to explore more carefully what ‘postcolonial’ or more broadly ‘oppositional’ readings people may already be, or have been, undertaking in reading an ‘organic theologian’, to twist Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, who has a strong – often strikingly assured – sense of her own agency.3 This is not to deny historical or denominational influence on someone like Mgqwetho, for, as we shall see, missionaries and mission discourse inform, but do not determine, her theology. * * * Terence Ranger says: ‘Any scholar who aspires today to “think in black” about many of the people in eastern Zimbabwe has to learn also to think Methodist’ (1994: 309). While I do explore the specific influence of Methodism below, I would extend that provocative statement further by saying that any scholar who aspires to ‘think in black’ about the African (sub)continent has to learn also to think biblically. The Bible is for many African Christians the foundational text of Africanness – an intratext of self-definition, rather than intertext of cross-cultural encounter.

3. Dube has herself argued elsewhere for the significance of ‘reading with’ (1996), an approach closer to that I investigate here than the more directed reading strategies she outlines in her contribution to the edited volume The Postcolonial Bible (1998). See the special issue of Semeia, on ‘Reading With: African Overtures’, edited by West and Dube (1996).

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For African Christians like Mgqwetho, the Bible – as opposed to ‘the white man’s Bible of the missionaries’, which she regards as heretical – provides a mode of being ethically and assertively African, especially in response to colonial depredation and social destruction.4 When she says in an early poem, If you would return to Jehovah with all your heart, cast out from among you all foreign gods. 1 Samuel 7:3 (Mgqwetho 2007: 32) she is clearly assuming Jehovah to be African, and she characterises such ‘foreign gods’ as money, alcohol and sexual immorality – the ‘idols’ of Western capitalism and colonial occupation. A clear influence in Mgqwetho’s assertion of an indigenised African Christianity is Methodism generally, and the AME Church in particular. The Wesleyans and Methodism are mentioned in various poems,5 and the editor of the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu in which she published, Marshall Maxeke, and his wife Charlotte were both high-profile figures within the AME Church. Mgqwetho seems to have had a close relationship with the Maxekes and writes of them approvingly in a number of poems, including describing Umteteli wa Bantu as having divine sanction (Mgqwetho 2007: 26). The couple met in the United States while Marshall was studying to become an AME missionary. With its roots in the African-American anti-slavery movement, and the formal incorporation of the Ethiopian Church in South Africa into the AME fold in 1896 (Campbell 1998: 103), the AME Church and Methodism provided an oppositional – if often accommodationist, rather than radical – tradition to that of white mission societies, which became increasingly conservative in their alliances with colonial politics and economics. Terence Ranger (1994) and James T. Campbell (1998) have written

4. I have discussed this at length elsewhere (see Brown 2006: 37–77). 5. See especially poems 31 and 56 in Mgqwetho (2007).

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extensively on the AME Church in southern Africa, and their work is suggestive in reading Mgqwetho’s poetry. A key theme within the AME Church doctrine was the consonance between ‘traditional’ or ‘tribal’ modes of life and Christianity. Mgqwetho affirms: My people, there’s pain in the truth: this regime controls our lives today. It thrashed us through trust in the scriptures, saying ‘Lay your blankets aside!’ [. . .] The truth must be treated fairly, the truth must be heard by both sides: the truth is there in the scriptures and also within our blankets (Mgqwetho 2007: 196). At an annual AME Church conference in eastern Zimbabwe some 30 years later, the newly appointed African archivist spoke analogously of the church’s commitment to both Bible and blanket: ‘Since we should be proud of our church and our tribal history – the cornerstone of our character and behaviour –  I want to lay greater emphasis on the importance of our people learning the worthwhile teachings of our Church and of our tribal life and putting them into practice’ (Ranger 1994: 281–2). The AME Church also placed considerable emphasis on the economic well-being of its congregants, preaching the ‘Gospel of the Plough’, and seeking to develop a prosperous peasantry, rather than impoverished labourers or migrant workers (287–8). Mgqwetho herself identifies the economics of subordination employed by colonial and mission administration: Our ignorance crushes us. My people, we mustn’t sell our maize, we’ll just be forced to buy it back. [. . .] Bright as pennies we all drink tea and trade our maize for sugar. [. . .]

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When we sell our maize, we sell it cheap; when we buy it, the white hikes the price (Mgqwetho 2007: 118–20). She also refers to the related need to buy land: ‘We’d do well to buy land: / black nations must act together’ (Mgqwetho 2007: 88). In particular, the AME Church was concerned with the social and economic plight of African women as ‘the most oppressed part of an oppressed race, enslaved or bartered and crushed by unremitting physical labour’ (Ranger 1994: 289), and formed women’s prayer unions, which feature prominently in Mgqwetho’s poems. AME preachers were also encouraged to use vernacular forms and oral techniques, as well as ‘indigenous’ images, such as cooking porridge or bridewealth (302–3), as evident in the African ‘parables’ told by someone like James Chikuse: ‘The caterpillar leaves his coat on a tree. He does not go back for it. It should be so when we leave our sins with Jesus’ (302). Such oral techniques and African proverbial allusions are widespread in Mgqwetho’s work. One could certainly read Mgqwetho as a talented, if representative, African Methodist woman of the early twentieth century, negotiating the complexities of life on the Witwatersrand with the discourses at her disposal, and I think that line of inquiry could yield fruit. But Mgqwetho’s work seems to exceed such an approach: with extraordinary authority she reads the Bible against its ‘misreadings’; her prophetic voice seems to range backwards and forwards in time, speaking eloquently to concerns that strike a chord even in South Africa in 2020. Her poems – as poems – spill beyond the confines of context and denomination. Mgqwetho is emphatic that ‘the Bible’ is a reading, rather than a book (there were several isiXhosa translations of the Bible available to her). Her own reading of the Bible is set against those of the missionaries, whose readings she perceived to be oppressive and blasphemous. She says, for example, ‘The hypocritical cant of the white man’s gospel / turns Phalo’s land on its head’ (Mgqwetho 2007: 160); ‘The simple truth is they came to oppress, / they came to blaspheme with their bible’ (230); and ‘When the white appeared, all was normal: / abnormality came with his bible’ (278). In contrast, she seeks in her reading a new, true, Bible: ‘The bible was written by prophets: / modern prophets, produce a new bible’ (84).

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In this new Bible, the biblical texts are ‘re-membered’ – to use West’s phrase (1999: 95–6) – they are re-authored; the new Bible authorises her and her fellows, granting both ‘authority’ and ‘authorship’. There was, and still is, certainly a strong emphasis on reading the Bible within the AME Church and Methodism generally, and Ranger points out that reading the Word is often central to testimonies of AME conversion (1994: 285). However Mgqwetho’s Bible reading extends far beyond such denominational requisites. She refers in her poems implicitly or explicitly to 30 of the 66 books of the Bible, ranging from Genesis to Revelation, and including Deuteronomy, Job, Song of Songs, the prophets, the psalms, the gospels and, especially, the Pauline letters. She assumes that her audience has considerable familiarity with the Bible. To take just one example, in a poem dealing with animosity between two women’s groups, Mgqwetho invokes the ‘dews of Hermon / watering Zion’s hills’ (2007: 162). The reference is to Psalms 133:3, though this is not stated in the poem, and the logic of Mgqwetho’s argument depends on one’s knowing the connotations of the image in the psalm (the psalm is about filial love). Her biblical authoring or re-authoring ranges from the subtle to the explicit. In a poem about the evils of alcohol, she refers to ‘Solomon’s proverbs in Chapter 22’. In fact that chapter in the book of Proverbs does not mention alcohol or drunkenness, but its general tenor of selfcontrol is appropriate. Mgqwetho thus implicitly draws Solomon into her temperance argument. More dramatically, she literally re-authors or re-members (and translates) the Bible for a (South) African context in the prose introduction to a poem that draws on the image of the writing on the wall from Daniel 5:25 (and again the title and first line of the poem assume a thorough knowledge of the Bible): Mene! Mene! Tekel! Parsin!! Daniel 5:25 That, my people, is the writing on the walls of the nation. It is written in Hebrew. The translation reads: ‘God has made a complete accounting of your kingdom. You have been weighed on the scale and found wanting. Your kingdom is therefore confiscated and handed to the nations on our borders.’ Now this

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seems to refer to you and to me. Take the fourth verse of the same chapter. It reads: ‘We drank wine and praised foreign gods of gold and silver, brass and iron, wood and stone.’ Isn’t that true? Look at the great variety of fripperies in this country. Reader, take note. Would that same hand that wrote on those walls over there not write today on the walls of Africa? Take again verse 23 in the same chapter. It reads: ‘We exalted ourselves above God in heaven.’ Today we considered our customs Red, thus making God a Red, He who holds in His hands our breath and our every path. Peace (Mgqwetho 2007: 200)!6 God is ‘made Red’ in the textuality of the prose introduction to poem 88, which improvises in the interactive style of the AME sermon or manyano preaching: Will the judge return? Yes! He says he is going to prepare a place for us (John 14:2; Hebrews 11:16; Galatians 4:26; Hebrews 11:10). Who among the prophets bears witness for Jesus that he saw this place? John (Revelation 21:2). Are we all permitted to go to that village? No! Why not? Aren’t all of us who go to prayers every Sunday Christians? No! Only those who heed his instructions (Revelation 22:14). Furthermore, those who do will see God face to face: consult Revelation 22:2–4; Matthew 5:8; Hebrews 12:14; Corinthians 13:12. May he who prepared a place for us in heaven be praised: Ephesians 1:3 (Mgqwetho 2007: 384). The poem, titled in Opland’s translation ‘Why Was the Bible Created?’, uses as its text Romans 15:4. Mgqwetho’s voice segues with that of Paul, without the use of quotation marks, into a discourse on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Xhosa prophet Ntsikana:

6. ‘The reference to “redness” [. . .] is specific to the Eastern Cape, where “red” denotes the ochre used as ornamentation by “traditional” amaXhosa and the terms “school people” and “red people” are used to differentiate between those who have embraced “modernity” and those who have not’ (Samuelson 2009: 250).

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For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by patience and by the encouragement of the scripture we might have hope. Now listen! Didn’t Ntsikana tell you to study the scriptures? And you left the whites to study them for you. I’m not mocking the white when I say that. But when it’s written ‘Seek and ye shall find,’ it doesn’t mean that someone else must do the finding. Listen then (Mgqwetho 2007: 420). Ntsikana is invoked by Mgqwetho in relation to prophecy and her own voice is powerfully prophetic. In a poem produced towards the end of 1924, Mgqwetho links Ntsikana with Isaiah, and the two prophets seem to hold the same status (as does she, perhaps, by the authority of her Bible reading and poem?): What does the prophet Isaiah say? When you’ve done trampling, you’ll be trampled. Why can’t you see what I’ve seen for so long? Didn’t Ntsikana tell you (Mgqwetho 2007: 242)? Similarly, in the prose introduction to a poem produced a little later, Mgqwetho invokes Isaiah 19:18, and then allows her own discourse to flow directly on from Isaiah’s, again via Ntsikana: We just don’t have time to fumble in the fog: consult Isaiah 19:18. On that day, five of the houses of the land of Egypt will speak in the Canaanite language and swear only by Jehovah of the hosts. And Canaan is the home of blacks everywhere. There is no Jehovah of Ntsikana alone or of the Mfengu alone. Oh, no! There is only the Jehovah of all the black nations under the sun, united, commemorating the same thing and crying as one: so clap your hands (Mgqwetho 2007: 300)! Ntsikana was perceived by many to be the first ‘to be a Christian while remaining an African’ (Mills 1997: 342–3). This alliance between Isaiah’s,

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Ntsikana’s and Mgqwetho’s prophetic modes may suggest that this is a specifically African-Christian voice. The prophetic is a return, a call to turn back from the wrong path, a looking backwards as much as forwards; it is retrospective, but with a clear present and future orientation. Es’kia Mphahlele describes prophecy in a distinctively African way, which is appropriate to Mgqwetho and Ntisikana (and Isaiah?): a prophet is someone who sings, the prophet sings, and in what [s/]he sings [s/]he repeats a number of things [. . .] I am using the word ‘sing’ in the widest possible sense. When you sing you repeat a number of notes. Just like the blues. As you sing, it echoes and goes forward and back again over what you have said before. A prophet does that (in Raditlhalo 2007: 268). In this model, prophecy is an improvisation on a series of notes, which closely matches the textual model of izibongo, itself a powerfully prophetic form. It seems that Mgqwetho, like Ntsikana in his ‘Great Hymn’, finds a significant congruence between the indigenous forms of praise poetry and the prophetic model of the Bible (one could describe the prophetic voices of Daniel, Jeremiah, Isaiah or Ezekiel as playing in different ways over the ‘same’ series of notes). While her poems are clearly influenced by the hymnal tradition, with the use of regular verse/stanzaic structure, they are at heart praise poems. Harold Scheub talks of the way in which the form of izibongo establishes a ‘grid’ on which images and symbols are constantly realigned and experienced in new relationships (1987: 485); improvisation happens within a set of ‘common’ images. The twentiethcentury African-Christian prophet Nontsizi Mgqwetho speaks as an imbongi (praise poet) through the modern medium of the newspaper, and her poems – which disappear when the paper is discarded, as the oral performance would exist only in the moment of its utterance – are, as David Coplan says of praise poetry generally, ‘elaborations upon a mutually resonant set of master metaphors [. . .] ordered according to an emotional and aesthetic logic of incremental effect’ (1987: 12). The praise poet is a liminal figure, one who speaks to the present from the perspective of past and future. He (or she in this case) is concerned

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with maintaining social cohesion and stability, but produces poems from a sense of inner compulsion, identified by Mphahlele as the catalyst for prophecy: Now before you can become a prophet, you have got to be discontented. No person gets up in the morning one day and decides to prophesy, just like that, without feeling a kind of ecstasy or rage – without a sense of compulsion. You have got to be driven by an inner compulsion (in Raditlhalo 2007: 269). That ‘inner compulsion’ involves, for people like Mgqwetho, a sense of living temporally and atemporally – to use the terms J.D.Y. Peel suggests are involved in religious experience generally (2003: 5) – of accessing spiritual power that speaks into as well as beyond the temporal and the earthly. In finding an answer to the question of how we might approach Mgqwetho, I have tried to take seriously her African-Christian belief, to give credence to her biblical understanding and to read through the textures and timbres of her poetic and prophetic address. In doing so, I find myself encountering a voice that speaks beyond history and into it, and offers an insistent address to present circumstances. Perhaps more than simply being politically opportunist, Mbeki was responding to the prophetic nature of Mgqwetho’s poetry in quoting her censure of political self-interest in the run-up to the Polokwane conference. I referred earlier, somewhat critically, to Opland’s judgement that Mgqwetho’s poetry was ‘refreshingly – and sadly – modern’ (in Mgqwetho 2007: xxxvi). As regards the prophetic nature of her AfricanChristian address, perhaps his comment is apposite. Lines like the following, written in 1924, have an extraordinary resonance in South Africa today: Take the African National Congress: we once burst our ribs in its praise. Now we go round in search of it: ‘Has anyone seen where it’s gone?’

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None can deny, I’m sorry to say, these questions have some point. But as for me, I’m not at pains to mock their efforts to date. Vying for status is lethal poison internally sapping Congress (Mgqwetho 2007: 94).

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Writing Belief, Reading Belief

It is sometimes necessary to remind ourselves that our pretended rationalist discourse is pronounced in a particular cultural dialect. — Marshall Sahlins, ‘Goodbye to Tristes Tropes’

In this chapter I attempt a second answer to the question Hilary Mantel asks in her review article on women saints: ‘When you look at [Gemma Galgani’s] strange life, you wonder what kind of language you can use to talk about her – through which discipline will you approach her?’ (2004: 14). These two chapters, and much of my other research work (see, for example, Brown 2009), are impelled by Mantel’s question: how do we as academics write (about) religious or spiritual belief? In a country like South Africa, and many other postcolonial societies, this is a question that demands address, as religious and spiritual discourses pervade public and private life in ways that they may not in more secularised European contexts. In particular, how do we write credibly, sympathetically and yet critically about beliefs that we may not share (in the case of this chapter, belief systems referred to in official census categories as ‘traditional African’ and often more colloquially as ‘witchcraft’), but that constitute the day-to-day realities of life for so many people – in which issues ranging from love relationships, to employment, housing, families, sport, health and security are mediated through a complex system of spiritual practices, which generally emerge in public discourse only in their negative or sensational aspects. And, in so doing, how do we rethink, reread and rewrite the larger issue of the place of the religious or spiritual in postcolonial modernities, or in a global context of neoliberalism in which rapacious capitalism and religion are at times in fierce opposition, at others in alarmingly close embrace, without slipping easily into the diagnostic or dismissive? Do we need other modes of writing? I take as 89

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my case study two fascinating texts by Adam Ashforth on the subject of ‘witchcraft’ in Soweto: a narrative titled Madumo: A Man Bewitched (2000); and an academic monograph, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (2005). Ashforth is an Australian-born academic, currently based in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. His two texts – very different in form from each other – are based on research he conducted in Soweto in the early to mid-1990s. Ashforth is himself a political scientist, though the books under discussion range far beyond the conventional methodologies of that discipline. In engaging with Ashforth’s work, I also consider some other attempts to write about belief on the subcontinent in more suggestive and challenging ways, in particular those of Harry G. West (between whose work and Ashforth’s there are many correspondences and cross-references). Two caveats. First, as Dale Wallace (2009), among others, has pointed out, the terms ‘witch’ and ‘witchcraft’ as applied to African belief systems are deeply problematic in their entanglement in colonial epistemologies and mission discourses. Ashforth does not use them unproblematically; indeed, in one sense his entire project in both books is to unpack these terms, which are freely used by those with whom he interacts in Soweto, though with multiple and shifting valences. Second, an obvious charge that can be laid at Ashforth’s door is that of colonial hubris: the Americanbased researcher coming to Soweto to explain Sowetans to themselves. Ashforth’s approach is, as I hope to demonstrate, humbler and more self-reflexive than that, and his own modes of understanding, knowing and identifying are themselves called into question, transformed and challenged – identities of self and other are in constant flux, movement, reversal. The two books represent two related takes on the subject of writing about belief and they share a central thesis: life in Soweto (which is treated as both a singular context and as metonymic of urban African life on the subcontinent) is shaped at the most fundamental level by spiritual insecurity. In Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa, Ashforth states: ‘My central contention is that the sense of injustice that rises from forms of spiritual insecurity in everyday life is as important to the political process in African contexts as the sense of injustice that arises

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from the experience of illegitimate violence and exploitation’ (2005: 17– 18). In Madumo, he observes: Over years of living in Soweto, I had come slowly to appreciate that most people here understand the powers spoken of as ‘witchcraft’ as palpable realities that are utterly commonplace and yet shrouded in the utmost secrecy, and that every aspect of social life, including politics, is permeated by these powers (2000: 16). Both books are interesting in themselves, but in this chapter I want to read them both with and against each other – as I think Ashforth himself writes them – in terms of the possibilities of genre which they exploit in addressing the question of spiritual belief. In so doing, I also pose some questions about postcolonial governance and modernities. * * * Before engaging in detailed analysis of Ashforth’s work, some discussion of the place of the religious or spiritual in the humanities and social sciences is necessary. Though for much of the twentieth century something to be ‘explained’, or preferably ‘explained away’ – variously as ‘superstition’, ‘mythology’, ‘precolonial consciousness’, ‘tradition’, ‘folklore’, ‘colonial capitulation’, a ‘negotiation of modernity’, ‘false consciousness’, ‘religious fundamentalism’, depending on the belief system, historical period or ideological assumptions of the scholar – or alternatively eliciting a shuffling embarrassment in the academy, notions of the religious, sacred or spiritual are now entering academic debate with increasing legitimacy and insistency. Whether positively embraced – Carruthers and Tate (2010); Chapman (2008); Sitoto (2009); Eagleton (2001, 2006, 2007, 2009) – or aggressively rejected (Creaven 2010; Dawkins 2006), what has been described as a ‘spiritual turn’ has become evident in the humanities and social sciences. As several scholars have noted – see especially Hyslop (2006) and West and Sanders (2003) – even in the ‘hard’ social sciences the assumption that humanity is on a teleogical path of ‘development’ from belief and faith to secular modernity – evident in the foundational thinking of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud and others – is

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increasingly perceived as fallacious and hubristic. Scholars talk instead of modalities of modernity, competing modernities or ‘vernacular modernities’ (West and Sanders 2003: 9), in which the religious, spiritual and sacred are legitimate and constitutive aspects of identity, citizenship and agency, especially in the postcolony (Bastian 2001; Eickelman 2000; Ortiz 2000; Chakrabarty 1999; Hanchard 1999; Lee 1999; Lynch 1999; Gewertz and Errington 1996). Perhaps more challengingly, there have been attempts to rethink the religious and spiritual as categories that undermine dichotomies between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’. Harry G. West and Todd Sanders try to avoid identifying the religious and spiritual as constitutive particularly of postcolonial modernities by introducing the term ‘occult cosmologies’ – which they define, in a non-pejorative sense, as ‘systems of belief in a world animated by the secret, mysterious, and/or unseen powers’. ‘Occult cosmologies,’ they claim, ‘suggest that there is more to reality than meets the eye – that reality is anything but “transparent” ’ (2003: 6). In their usage, ‘occult cosmologies’ potentially include a wide range of practices of belief, including ‘conspiracy theories’ evident in the United States and elsewhere: To imagine the world in this way is to problematize a host of previously assumed dichotomies, including those between tradition and modernity, between the West and the rest, and between the local and the global. It is to suggest that global processes and local worlds are mutually constitutive [. . .] It is to suggest that modernity has escaped the proprietorship of the West and that it has found new stewards among the rest. It is to suggest that modernity is instantiated in moments of cultural reproduction and in the adaptation of varied local traditions to ever-changing historical circumstances (West and Sanders 2003: 10–11). With its roots in historical materialism (or, in later manifestations, poststructuralism) postcolonial studies has also generally been fairly hostile to the notion of the spiritual – ironically so in view of the pervasiveness of religious and spiritual discourses in the postcolony – but new publications have seen this field also respond to the spiritual turn (see

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Brown 2009). Perhaps most emblematically, whereas the original 1995 edition of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s influential book, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, gave little or no attention to the religious or spiritual, the revised second edition now concludes with a section of essays devoted to ‘the sacred’. The editors motivate the addition as follows: The sacred has been an empowering feature of post-colonial experience in two ways: on one hand indigenous concepts of the sacred have been able to interpolate dominant conceptions of cultural identity; and on the other Western forms of the sacred have often been appropriated and transformed as a means of local empowerment. Analyses of the sacred have been one of the most neglected, and may be one of the most rapidly expanding areas of post-colonial study (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 2006: 8). More serious and sympathetic attention to the ‘sacred’ has also come from an unexpected source: the avowed materialist Terry Eagleton. In his well-known response to Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, Eagleton argues, with characteristic vigour and satirical edge, for the coexistence of belief and reason – and faith and academic study: Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism, and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’ (Eagleton 2006: 2).

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He continues: Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself (Eagleton 2006: 2). He also offers a sensitive and nuanced exposition of Christian belief against what he perceives to be Dawkins’s crass reductionism, an exposition that could come from the keyboard of the most committed believer. This reading ‘with’ rather than ‘against’ the Christian grain is evident in a variety of Eagleton’s works, in particular The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (2001), Jesus Christ: The Gospels (2007) and Reason, Faith, and Revolution (2009). What is remarkable in Eagleton’s work – perhaps exemplary for the project I am undertaking, and which I argue Ashforth pursues with such success – is that he offers readings that ‘voice’ belief, rather than ‘reporting’ doctrine, allowing the explanatory power of belief without necessarily endorsing it. In Reason, Faith, and Revolution, he talks explicitly about ‘trying to “ventriloquize” what I take to be a version of the Christian gospel’, but insists that this does not mean uncritical endorsement (‘I do not want to be taken for a dummy’) (2009: xii). Among other things, in ‘writing faith’ Eagleton uses ‘literary’ techniques such as a shift into the critical-theoretical equivalent of novelistic freeindirect discourse, or internal focalisation: narrating the belief from within, but retaining the critical distance of the external narrator (the critic as third-person narrator, though not omniscient).1 1. For a more detailed analysis of Eagleton’s textual strategies in this regard, see Brown (2009: 17–20).

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Within those disciplines that have historically engaged with the religious and spiritual – in particular anthropology, religious studies and theology – there have been some significant theoretical and methodological changes. Whereas the project of anthropology has historically been making ‘sense’ of the ‘other’, especially in relation to non-Western peoples, and its entanglement with the imperial and colonial projects is well documented, more recent work has not only turned the anthropological gaze on ‘us’ as much as ‘them’, but has also increasingly sought – often through a process of explicit or covert co-authorship, and taking seriously the idea of ‘immaterial evidence’ (West 2005) – to stage debates about epistemological difference in more candid and open-ended ways: neither researcher nor researched holds the monopoly on truth claims. In religious studies and theology, some of the most challenging new work has taken on board postcolonial theorising about the agency of the colonial and postcolonial subject.2 As the anthropologist Harry G. West says of his work in Mozambique, this involves ‘presenting readers with questions that Muedans would recognize as their own, and with others that they would not’ (2005: 5). With regard to my own discipline, English or literary studies, its twentieth-century critical history has largely been shaped by the secular ideologies (some might say ‘quasi-secular’, in view of the evangelical tendencies of some of its practitioners – from F.R. Leavis to Homi Bhabha) of liberal humanism, formalism, structuralism, new historicism, historical materialism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and critical theory. Literature itself may not have retreated from the spiritual, but its criticism and theory largely have. The ‘spiritual turn’ is, however, evident in recent work in the (inter)discipline. Among other examples, Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate have produced an edited collection, titled

2. See Gerald West’s notions of ‘re-membering’ the Bible, referred to in the previous chapter (1996, 1999), Nkosinathi Sithole’s studies of the interpretation of Nazarite hymns, dance and near-death narratives (2005, 2009, 2010, 2016), Tahir Sitoto on Africanising influences in Islam (2009) and Musa Dube’s work on postcolonial Bible readings (1996, 1998), which take seriously, but not as the final ‘word’ (perhaps in its properly scriptural sense) readings of the Bible, or the Koran, for example, produced by Africans using indigenous, indigenised or alternative hermeneutic strategies.

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Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination (2010). In the preface Gavin D’Costa claims that the book ‘map[s] a postsecular writing, the formation of new forms of spiritual identity’, and he points to a ‘shared confidence’ among the contributors ‘that literature provides the “space” into which the “religious impulses” that persist in the creative imagination might flow’ (2010: x). And this at a time, he adds (mischievously? acerbically?), ‘when many like Richard Dawkins had falsely imagined it was safe to go out to the bookstore, or even to the literary studies shelves in a modern university library’. Arthur Bradley, Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate begin their introduction to the volume: This collection considers the ‘return’ of the religious in contemporary literary studies. It seems that the rumours of the death of religion have been, like reports of the untimely demise of Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated. [. . .] It is now possible to detect a new sacred ‘turn’ or ‘return’ [. . .] in contemporary thought and writing (2010: 1). In South Africa, the work of David Levey (1999, 2007) has been exemplary in trying to balance the demands of critical rigour and the realities of belief in literary studies. In a special issue of the journal Current Writing on ‘Religion and Spirituality in a Postcolonial Context’, which I edited, Michael Chapman argued in his article ‘Postcolonial Studies: A Spiritual Turn’: If the disjunction between people’s lives and academic discourse is evident in the secular world, it is acute once a religious or spiritual dimension enters the postcolonial ambit. The article seeks to turn the secular (social) demand towards a dimension of the ‘sacred’. It seeks a sympathy between spiritual expression and literary-poetic expression (2008: 67). While much of the work on the religious or spiritual in literary studies is occurring in relation to the more ‘canonical’ genres of the novel, the poem and the play, I would argue that it is particularly in the ‘new’ genres, which write across the boundaries of the imaginative and the empirical,

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the symbolic and the referential, the metaphorical and the measurable, the literary and anthropological, the poetic and the historical, that notions of belief, difference, identity and agency are often most challengingly explored.3 Ashforth’s work seems to me exemplary in this regard. * * * Madumo: A Man Bewitched is the earlier of Ashforth’s texts I focus on in this chapter and differs markedly from the later Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa. It offers a narrative account of the author’s friendship with a man called ‘Madumo’ who, with the author’s assistance, embarks upon a journey to find healing from the devastating consequences of what he believes is bewitchment that has been inflicted upon him. Following the death of his mother, he has himself been accused of witchcraft and thrown out of the family home by his brother and sisters. Attributing his misfortune to the witchcraft practised on him, Madumo visits a range of healers and prophets in search of healing, accompanied by Ashforth. The text is difficult to categorise generically. Ashforth himself seems hesitant in labelling it. In ‘A Note to the Reader’ he begins: ‘In this book I tell a story, arising from a decade-long friendship’ (2000 vii; my emphasis). This is based upon our shared experiences and taped conversations; interviews and discussions with others; journals and letters (both Madumo’s and mine); together with my own observations and recollections, and speculations I leavened with a good measure of gossip deriving from my time in Soweto since 1990 – not to mention books I have read and things I’ve forgotten (Ashforth 2000: vii).

3. In my view, possibly the most significant text in this regard to have been published in South Africa is There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele (2009).

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Madumo, who had wanted his plight of bewitchment recorded as a ‘case study’, and is in a sense a shadow-author and co-narrator in the text, was according to Ashforth ‘rather surprised when he saw what I’d made of his story, for he said he was expecting more of a “documentary”, something more “academic” ’ (Ashforth 2000: vii). Madumo did however judge Ashforth’s ‘tale a “true story” despite the bits of “fabrication” (his term) supplied here and there to “appetize the reader” ’. Finally, Ashforth says, ‘I present this book, then, not as a scientific treatise nor as a transcript from a court of law, but rather as a story, particular and personal, drawn from life.’ In literary terms, what he has produced would be termed ‘creative non-fiction’, a genre with a long history, which we need not rehearse here. Despite his extensive use of fictional techniques (in particular, narration, dialogue and shifting focalisation, more of which below) Ashforth seems insistent that Madumo should not be considered a novel (as Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines is, a text that is formally close to Ashforth’s and also approaches the question of writing belief ).4 In refusing the genre of the novel, Ashforth seems to be claiming what Tom Wolfe (1996: 49) describes as the ‘in-built advantage’ of that analogous form, the New Journalism: the assumption, on the part of the reader, that ‘all this actually happened’, something akin to the ‘autobiographical contract’. As readers we may question Ashforth’s narrative portrayal of the man he calls Madumo and his suffering, or we may even dispute the significance of his story or the relationship between Ashforth and Madumo, but we cannot – in terms of the conventions of the genre – deny the existence of the man or the fact of his suffering. We are manoeuvred into having to engage with Madumo and his bewitchment, without the option of dismissing him as a problematic fictional construct, as – for example – hostile readers might do with David Lurie or Petrus in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. In a serious engagement with the question of how to narrate Madumo’s story of spiritual possession, Ashforth seems to find in the shifting, ambiguous and yet also demarcated space of creative nonfiction new possibilities for narration and identification. Ashforth is somewhat sceptical about Madumo’s bewitchment, even exclaiming in the narrative at one point, ‘Fuck this shit, man. [. . .] A 4. Chatwin refers to The Songlines as a novel of ideas.

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feast for the ancestors? What’ve the ancestors ever done for you? [. . .] Nothing. And they never will’ (2000: 228), though it must be added that the beliefs of the Sowetans who feature in the narrative are complex and various, including degrees of scepticism coexisting with fear or wariness.5 In Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa Ashforth describes himself as a ‘tolerant secular humanist’ (2005: xiv), but his narrative engages with Madumo’s spiritual condition in a way that echoes the approach of Hilary Mantel, whose work on women saints I referred to at the outset of this chapter. Ashforth’s relationship with Madumo arose through a friend from South Africa putting him in touch with people in Soweto who could show him around and arrange accommodation for him as part of his research as a political scientist on the transition to democracy, following the publication of his earlier monograph, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (1990). From this initial contact developed a friendship involving Madumo, Mpho (another character in the text) and others, which all concerned characterised as a form of ‘brotherhood’, with its share of filial misunderstandings and arguments. Beyond Ashforth sharing his research findings with Madumo, who was a university student at that time, this does not appear initially to be an ethnographic research relationship. Madumo only becomes a research subject many years into the relationship, at his own request, and at that a research subject frequently more knowledgeable than his interlocutor, though the knowledge/power differential is in constant flux in the narrative. Beyond being able to provide some (fairly modest) financial support, and carrying with him the novelty of being a white person in 5. In talking about uwavi (sorcery) as a language of power for Muedans in Mozambique, Harry G. West also refers to the multiple and competing languages of power that Muedans have learned: ‘Ironically, the interconnectedness of our world renders more challenging Mbembe’s mandate to identify, and “cultivate” other languages of power, for [. . .] many Muedans are conversant in multiple languages of power, having gained various degrees of fluency in the languages introduced to them by their Others, including the language of the slave trade, the language of Portuguese colonialism, the language of revolutionary nationalism, the language of scientific socialism, and, finally, the language of neoliberal democracy’ (2005: 3). The same applies in the context of Soweto, in which the language of witchcraft is one of many competing discourses in Ashforth’s narrative.

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a black township, Ashforth is not in a particularly privileged position in Soweto vis-à-vis Madumo and Mpho, who possess the cultural capital that enables them access to their society, which the researcher could never gain. The text employs first-person narration. Part of the effect is to register vividly Ashforth’s experience of the township milieu, as in the opening passage: No one answered when I tapped at the back door of Madumo’s home on Mphahlele Street a few days after my return to Soweto, so I pushed the buckling red door in a screeching grind of metal over concrete and entered calling ‘Hallo?’ From behind the bedroom door to the left of the kitchen Madumo’s sister, Ouma, peered out, her head wrapped in a faded blue towel. She greeted me and gestured towards the sitting room before returning to her bath (2000: 1). The first-person narration is also used to point out key assumptions of the narrator that prove to be fallacious or ill informed. Ashforth describes his initial dismissal of spirit possession as ‘arrogant’ (2000: 47), and acknowledges near the end of the text: ‘My life in Soweto has forced me to question assumptions I’d never even realised I took for granted’ (255). It is a narrative of growing humility and uncertainty on the part of the narrator. Set against Ashforth’s voice, through a process of narrative ‘twinning’, is the voice of Madumo, speaking sometimes with, sometimes against that of Ashforth. Madumo’s voice is heard through the use of monologue, dialogue, Madumo’s own texts (such as letters) and also focalisation through him, such as when he is thrown out of home: He staggered to his feet and kicked the resonant metal door with enough force to buckle it in at the bottom and leave him hopping and cursing with bruised toes. Vagrant wisps of acrid smoke from the pile of blankets still smouldering in the corner of the yard burnt into his eyes, blinding him with anger and anguish (Ashforth 2000: 29).

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Juxtaposed with overtly fictional strategies are passages of sociological or political analysis, which provide an economic and historical edge to the ‘argument’ of the narrative: With the ending of apartheid, profound transformations in everyday life in Soweto began. The greater opportunities afforded to Africans in government and business exacerbated rapidly growing inequalities within black populations, which in previous generations had been compelled to live in conditions of relative socio-economic parity. At the same time, the community solidarity fashioned through political opposition to an oppressive regime fragmented into a frenzy of individualistic consumerism. Opportunities greatly expanded for the new black elite and the swelling middle classes, accelerating a trend that had been underway for more than a decade, but the benefits expected from democracy failed to materialise for the majority of the population (Ashforth 2000: 8–9). These uncertain and unstable political conditions provide a fertile breeding ground for ‘occult cosmologies’, though they do not sufficiently explain them: Now, with apartheid gone, the sorrows of an unfair fate could only be measured, case by case, against the conspicuous ‘progress’ and good fortune of particular relatives, colleagues, and neighbours, not to mention the ubiquitous images in the media of black people who had made it, and advertisements tailored to their desires. Such post-apartheid developments fed undercurrents of jealousy and envy – a dangerous development in a place such as Soweto, where physical and spiritual security is so precarious. There, jealousy is widely considered to be the primary motivation not only of physical violence, but also of witchcraft, and witchcraft, loosely understood as the capacity to cause harm or accumulate wealth by illegitimate occult means, permeates every aspect of everyday life (Ashforth 2000: 9).

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The narrative is perplexing, in that Madumo’s search for a cure takes him far and wide, from African-initiated church prophets to traditional healers of varying degrees of apparent integrity, and with varying degrees of success. His ‘cure’ (in the final stages of which izinyanga [traditional healers], the Zionist Christian Church, the ancestors and an Anglican predecessor are all mentioned) is in Ashforth’s eyes anything but certain, though Madumo says: ‘Everything is going to get the green light. Mr Zondi told me. He’s sure of it’ (Ashforth 2000: 241). Much of the narrative ‘work’ in this regard is carried by dialogue: ‘What did he tell you, this inyanga?’ I asked when Madumo returned with the bottles and glasses. Mpho popped the top of one bottle with another and filled his glass with Castle lager, passing the bottle to me next. ‘He told me about fate,’ replied Madumo, tipping droplets of water from his glass to the floor in the manner of someone paying homage to unseen spirits before filling it with beer from the bottle I passed. ‘He told me about fate and misfortune and the lack of communication with my ancestors.’ ‘Is that all?’ said Mpho. Though pleased to see Madumo cheerful for a change, he was still feeling less than charitable towards our friend. ‘And again, about that girlfriend that I’m having a kid with: He said she’s very jealous and wants to be married by me.’ ‘That’s way off the mark,’ Mpho snorted (Ashforth 2000: 57–8). And yet even the apparently secular humanist Ashforth is struck by aspects of ‘truth’ in some of the prophecies, and he finds unexpected succour in certain of the rituals, though he continues to negotiate a liminal space for himself both within and outside of the healing process. Epistemological and social authorities are destabilised and narrative authority deferred, displaced, renegotiated. The text constitutes a sustained attempt to engage with the complexities and contradictions of spiritual belief, which is, for those involved, fundamental to their sense of identity and being. That said, the text provides no narrative closure, no clear answer to the questions

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it poses, and its insights are partial, ambivalent and contradictory, but nevertheless compelling. Ashforth confesses his own uncertainty about the matter of bewitchment at the end of the narrative: ‘After all these hours of talking about witchcraft, I cannot truthfully say that I really understand it. I can describe what people say easily enough and trace the implications of their actions. But the core of the matter still eludes me’ (Ashforth 2000: 253–4). He does, however, acknowledge the significant challenge Madumo offers to his own secular humanism: ‘That I cannot follow [Madumo] into this domain [of the soul/spirit] results, I have no doubt, from a lack of imagination rather than from superior intelligence or enlightenment’ (254). * * * I turn now to Ashforth’s second account of witchcraft, published five years after Madumo. In support of his argument about the prevailing spiritual and physical insecurity that characterises life in Soweto, he says: ‘My friend Madumo summed up the situation well when he told me back in 1991 that “here in Soweto life is too much exposed” ’ (2005: 24). Unusually for an academic monograph, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa frequently references Madumo as a source, and the two books seem to be both complementary and competing accounts. While Madumo is a creative narrative that involves in its form an academic argument (which would cause headaches for a university research office trying to decide whether it qualified as a piece of academic research . . .), Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa is an academic monograph – with the accompanying paraphernalia of references, bibliography, footnotes and an appendix – which writes about belief in nuanced, impressionistic, but also academically rigorous ways. Ashforth’s argument with regard to the ‘spiritual insecurity’ pervading life in Soweto addresses something as difficult to identify and explain, but also as structurally evident, as what Raymond Williams refers to as the ‘structure of feeling’, and much of his research efforts involve learning ‘how to ask’ (Briggs 1986: 15). Ashforth’s concern, from the perspective of political science, is how this ‘spiritual insecurity’ articulates with the politics of democracy; he

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wishes to take seriously what Harry G. West, quoting Achille Mbembe, refers to as ‘other languages of power’, which ‘emerge from the daily life of the people, [and] address everyday fears and nightmares, and the images with which people express or dream them’ (West 2005: 2). As West argues: ‘If Mbembe is right – as I believe he is – the objective is one of urgent consequence. So long as policymakers and citizens [and academics?] speak mutually unintelligible languages of power, the project of democracy is impossible’ (3). But Ashforth’s argument seems to exceed this political-democratic project. He admits: My original research plan focused upon the politics of representation in a transition to democracy. I was intending to develop ideas elaborated in my first book (Ashforth 1990) by examining how social categories defined by the state as ‘ethnic’ and ‘racial’ were reconfigured in the course of crafting a democratic, all-inclusive constitution. This worthy plan fell by the wayside as I became ever more engrossed in the task of learning how to live in a place like Soweto (Ashforth 2005: x). His research methods run academic reading against years spent gossiping at the kitchen table, drinking in shebeens, downing countless cups of tea and bottles of beer, and drifting in the currents of stories that sweep friends, family and neighbours – along with a multitude of strangers more distant – through life, becoming part of the trials and tragedies, glories and joys of everyday life while sitting out the endless days of simple boring rounds until the sudden explosion of anger that shatters all routine like the violence of a summer thunderstorm (Ashforth 2005: xv). Ashforth’s approach does not conform to conventional ethnography. In Madumo he says: Perhaps I should follow the strategy of the serious ethnographer and apprentice myself to a healer to learn fully the nature of the

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work. But I would feel ridiculous doing such a thing. Besides, the work of the witch is cloaked in utter secrecy. No matter how much you know about witchcraft, you can only know what is possible (and I know enough now to know that anything is possible); you can never know how it is done (Ashforth 2000: 254). Likewise, in his engagement with Muedan uwavi, Harry G. West – whose work Ashforth draws on and vice versa – also rejects the ‘apprenticeship’ model, intended to lead to growing enlightenment through revelation, for a more contradictory, partial and elusive narrative model, which resists closure: Like many scholars of sorcery, I place myself in the narrative, producing what James Clifford – drawing on Bakhtin – has referred to as ‘dialogical ethnography’ [.  .  .] However, whereas other scholars of sorcery have made the story of their apprenticeship the central thread of their narrative – often in the form of accounts of personal journey from incomprehension to understanding – I have rejected this narrative trope. My reasons for this derive from the awkward tension I discovered to exist between my experience of studying uwavi in the field and the understanding of uwavi I developed both in the field and ‘back home’. In the field, the study of uwavi was oftentimes profoundly disorienting. Knowledge gained one day was lost the next as I gathered contradictory evidence or became aware of disparate perspectives. Not only was my journey nonlinear, but it seemingly led to no final destination. [. . .] What uwavi discourse told Muedans was that the world is made, unmade, and remade in a hidden realm. What most Muedans knew about uwavi was that they didn’t know uwavi. This state of affairs – not to mention my own experience of it as an anthropologist – may be commonplace [. . .] Through the trope of apprenticeship, however, anthropologists have often given a rather different impression (West 2005: 9–10).

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In this process, Ashforth’s humbler, more clearly defined academic project about belief, representation and democracy is exceeded by the more challenging project of encountering and writing difference and belief, including one’s own, though the question of balancing the demands of ‘belief ’ and ‘governance’ remains. Ashforth’s explication of this is worth quoting at length since it talks both to my own concerns in this chapter and to his engagement with the figure of Madumo in the earlier creative narrative: Perhaps the most difficult challenge I have faced in dealing with issues of spiritual insecurity has arisen from the necessity of taking seriously (and by this I mean treating as literal statements) propositions about witchcraft that seem evidently absurd and nonsensical without thereby denigrating the people who utter them as idiotic or stupid. This I believe is one of the greatest challenges facing anyone who would write about spiritual insecurity. It is far too easy to dismiss such propositions as mere ignorance and almost as easy to assert that they should not be taken literally but should be interpreted as figurative or metaphorical statements about something else. Tolerant secular humanists, such as myself, find it extremely difficult to accept that otherwise reasonable people believe as literally true impossibilities such as propositions about virgin births, spaceships behind the Hale-Bopp comet, or healers living seven years under the water of a lake. And we find it difficult to understand how matters such as blasphemy or apostasy (differences that should be treated as disagreements about belief, faith or identity about which reasonable people can agree to disagree) can be treated as matters of public safety for which offenders must be put to death. But unless we make the imaginative leap to treat propositions about invisible forces seriously, the social and political dynamics of vast portions of humanity will remain incomprehensible (Ashforth 2005: xiv). Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa accordingly engages with spiritual-experiential issues such as ‘on living in a world with

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witches’, ‘death, pollution and the dangers of dirt’, ‘invisible beings in everyday life’ and ‘vulnerabilities of the soul’, alongside the more publicly political topics of ‘freedom, democracy and witchcraft: Soweto in the 1990s’ and ‘democratic statecraft in a world of witches’. Textually, Ashforth’s monograph takes risks, shifting narrative strategies frequently and often eschewing the measured academicdiscursive third person for the engaged, embarrassed or confused firstperson. Two examples may suffice. In the first, conventional academic argument is supported by first-person observation and involvement (even hearsay): As the 1990s wore on, the legal, political and ideological infrastructure of racial domination in South Africa was steadily dismantled. The apartheid system came to an end and with it the emotional resonance of that harsh word signifying shared oppression for black people. No one in Soweto lamented its passing, though I did hear an occasional mordant cynic foretelling doom ahead (Ashforth 2005: 95). In the second example, Ashforth abandons the third-person entirely for a narrative account of a visit to the ancestors with his adopted Soweto family in which he himself participates in the ritual, albeit with profoundly contradictory emotions: I was the last to speak. I took the mqomboti in my mouth – gritty, sour, milky, delicious – spitting just as the others had done. ‘Ntate Moholo’, I said, using the Sotho idiom, ‘I am Adam. I don’t know if you know me. I am the new son. I am thankful. For four years I have been living here. Living here with your family. I came as a visitor from overseas, and they made me one of their own. Thank you.’ Then I ran out of things to say. I was beginning to feel foolish. I paused. It was one of those eternal moments. ‘Grandfather . . .’ I continued in English, fumbling for words. ‘They have looked after me so well, made me part of your family. They have made me safe. I am leaving today for America, for New York, I don’t know when I will be able to come

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back. Please look after everyone when I am away so that . . . so that when I come back I can find them all living . . . living well. So that I can find them all well and happy.’ Again I fell silent. I could not think of anything else to say. I could not find words to express my gratitude to the people with whom I was standing by the grave of their ancestor on a Soweto winter’s morning. I could not say anything sensible to that slab of granite, so I dribbled on the stone and placed it on the grave (Ashforth 2005: 195). It is a significant moment: the literate and sceptical political scientist from the United States stutters into silence before a gravestone in Soweto, at once profoundly emotional and acutely self-conscious. * * * In his two accounts of witchcraft in Soweto, Ashforth seems to offer possible answers to the question posed by Hilary Mantel of the saint, Gemma Galgani, which I quoted at the beginning of this chapter: ‘When you look at her strange life, you wonder what kind of language you can use to talk about her – through which discipline will you approach her?’ (2004: 14). His work limns new ways of thinking and writing about belief, which acknowledge the importance of spirituality without simply acceding to it; which write about belief credibly, while nevertheless retaining critical perspective; which engage with issues of identity and governance in both the visible and invisible realms. Such approaches have significant implications for writing on and from South Africa and many other postcolonial societies, in which religious and spiritual belief and identification are pervasive and are integral to individual and national identity formations and epistemes. As Ashforth acknowledges near the end of the book Madumo: ‘For Madumo, like everyone else I know in Soweto, the world is full of meaning, of signs of the presence and purposes of invisible powers. To empty it of meaning would be as absurd as to empty it of air’ (Ashforth 2000: 251).

Finding My Way 109  CHAPTER FIVE

Creative Non-Fiction A Conversation with Antjie Krog

Duncan Brown (DB):  Creative non-fiction has become in a sense ‘the genre’ of South African writing (recently, your own work, as well as that of Sihle Khumalo, Jacob Dlamini, Max du Preez, Rian Malan, Kevin Bloom, Denis Beckett, Shaun Johnson, Jonny Steinberg, Stephen Otter, John Carlin, Njabulo S. Ndebele, Jeff Opland, Julia Martin, Sarah Nuttall, Liz McGregor, Hedley Twidle; historically, Sol T. Plaatje, Can Themba, Nat Nakasa, Todd Matshikiza, Alan Paton, H.I.E. Dhlomo and many more): writing that makes its meanings at the unstable fault line of the literary and journalistic, the imaginative and the reportorial. Antjie Krog (AK):  I suspect it has something to do with our history of ‘apartness’, that we are continually busy translating ourselves, our landscapes, our communities and our experiences of other communities to one another. We can perhaps not begin to value each other’s fantasies or fictions, if we don’t understand the realities that gave rise to them. I am therefore much more delighted to have read Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia (2009) than I would have been had he fictionalised it. (On the other hand, what is Ivan Vladislavić ’s fictional Portrait with Keys (2006) other than non-fiction about a part of Johannesburg? You see, this is an impossible topic!) But I believe non-fiction writing is also about unearthing a hidden or unacknowledged or unnoticed life. I read somewhere that you only begin to write when you come across something in your life that you find nobody has written or has written about how you see it. So there are such obvious and huge gaps in South African society that every second person must feel she has to fill a vacuum. I also believe that every single creative person in the country is reacting to the more than 2 000 overwhelmingly black Truth and Reconciliation 109

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Commission (TRC) testimonies that have been fed into the air in recent years – either by contradicting, confirming, nuancing, undermining, finding another style of being a black/white/male/female voice, or even ignoring them. If all of this has settled, fiction could perhaps return to its proper place in our society. DB:  What would fiction’s ‘proper place’ be, if that isn’t too simplistic a question? (J.M. Coetzee commented at some point that he was sick of being asked the ‘tired question’ about the ‘role’ of South African literature.) AK:  For me, fiction would imagine our togetherness, would take risks from what we know into what we have never imagined – for example, whites without any power at all, or everybody being coloured, for it is crucial to start creating an ‘imagined community’ in our South African narrative. But I have always suspected that one needs financial stability and a confident grip on one’s surroundings in order to begin to imagine. Why, for example, did so little writing come out of the Boer concentration camps? The best Anglo-Boer War poetry and fiction came mainly from men who were either not in the war or with the commandos. To use an image: it’s like trying to catch a fish. But you cannot begin to use the fishing rod if you don’t know and understand the embankment on which you have to plant yourself. Without the fish, we will die of hunger, but you will not get there if you don’t sort out the embankment and the water – this is what non-fiction does. The role of fiction is to lift above the water for one incredible moment: a living fish. DB:  The inside jacket cover of the third volume in the Country of My Skull trilogy, Begging to Be Black (2009), describes it as a work of ‘literary non-fiction’. The other term that has some currency at present is ‘creative non-fiction’ and, historically, there is the analogous genre of ‘New Journalism’ (and the other term ‘faction’, which has very unfortunate connotations in our country!). What is your take on this? AK:  I am actually quite deurmekaar [confused] whenever I’m asked this question. Recently I put it to a Dutch book buyer (he buys for bookshops from publishers) and his answer was: apart from biography and memoirs,

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we have only two main rubrics – non-fiction and literary non-fiction. By the latter we simply mean that it is better written than non-fiction, more skill, more craft, more literary devices and better language. Interviewers have called Country of My Skull anything from ‘faction’ to a ‘novel’, and I have never interfered with that because frankly I don’t know anymore where the lines run. The moment one uses something as ‘unreal’ as language to describe a live, three-dimensional, complex moment, one is already falsifying, fictionalising by deciding which angle, which words to use and what detail to leave out. So in one way I would say nothing that has been written had not already been heavily tampered with; even the simplest journalism is inadequate in giving a single fact in its complete fullness – the moment there is language, reality is already affected. On the other hand, working for SABC [South African Broadcasting Coporation] radio confirmed the important differences between literary non-fiction and journalism. One of my first stories was about how squatters were surviving the south-easter wind. My story started as follows: ‘ “Nail! Nail the screw!”, Mrs Mohapi shouted to her son as he was battling to secure the roof of her shack in Joe Slovo squatter camp.’ I was ordered to change the first line into fact. But all of it was fact, I said. No, general fact I was told: ‘Over the weekend squatters battled the stormy south-easter wind. When SABC visited Joe Slovo squatter camp families were . . . et cetera.’ The facts should be confirmed by three sources and conveyed in a general tone with standard jargon. For literary non-fiction I depend on three devices: a literary form to tell the nonfiction; a more imaginative language; and the pronoun ‘I’. Firstly, by literary form I mean a basic storytelling technique: a beginning, a buildup to a climax and a conclusion. Why? Because that has always been the best way to tell a story, even a true story. Secondly, as a poet I instinctively tend to trust the capacity of language to capture the ‘in-captureable’ at the very moment it stretches into the poetic. This kind of language is particularly helpful when one is analysing a real-life situation and finds oneself really not able to capture what makes this scene so remarkable. Interestingly enough, Elaine Scarry in Dreaming by the Book (2001) identifies five formal practices that writers use to execute the mimetic aspect of writing: ‘radiant ignition’ (injecting light into the image that is being described); ‘rarity’ (focusing on the rareness or uniqueness of what

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is being described); ‘dyadic addition or subtraction’ (focusing on a static image or panning out); ‘stretching, folding and tilting’ (manipulating the images by distorting particular facets); and, lastly, ‘floral supposition’ (using descriptions of flowers to make the moment more real for the reader than were she to experience it herself ). Thirdly, I use the pronoun ‘I’, which immediately creates space allowing for an individual take on facts, a deeper reading and interpretation of the non-fictional ‘reality’. The ‘I’ also allows me personal access to fact. I cannot speak on behalf of Afrikaners, but I can speak as an Afrikaner. At the same time, the ‘I’ is also immediately ‘multi-voiced’ – its meaning determined by the countless previous contexts of the word ‘I’ as it has appeared in my poetry, my journalism and even all the other writers using the pronoun ‘I’. As Mikhail Bakhtin suggests, every word, expression, utterance or narrative bears the traces of all subjects, possible and real, who have ever used or will use this word, expression, utterance or narrative. The ‘I’ also at times assists the reader who can piggyback into the text – safe in the knowledge that the ‘I’ would never abandon them. I guess the final deurmekaar-scratching of everything for me was of course J.M. Coetzee who since Boyhood seems to make the point from the other side: how easy is it to detect the precise point that a novel slips from fiction into the autobiographical? Didn’t he say that all fiction is autobiographical and all autobiography is fiction? Would it therefore not be more ethical to admit: I have given up on reality? DB:  Tom Wolfe says of the New Journalism: The result is a form that is not merely like a novel. It consumes devices that happen to have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other device known to prose. And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what a power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened. The disclaimers have been erased. The screen is gone. The writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of and never achieved (1996: 49).

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Does this resonate with you? I’m thinking of the fact that you have specifically avoided the option of simply calling your work fiction, a generic definition that would manoeuvre you out of a series of ethical and legal complexities. What are the benefits of refusing the simple option of calling your work fiction or novels? AK: What I find an interesting question is why Tom Wolfe uses the phrase ‘it enjoys an advantage’. Why does he think it is an advantage? In the past people preferred to read fiction because it ‘lied the truth’ much better than any non-fiction did. I would never say that Dostoyevsky or Zola or Patrick White or James Joyce did not get readers absolutely involved! People prefer films to documentaries because the unimaginables of the documentary will be filled by the film-maker’s imagination. It is a question: why in South Africa are the sales of non-fiction apparently outstripping those of fiction? And why don’t I prefer Coetzee’s Boyhood to, say, Age of Iron, because the first seems closer to a biographical truth? So I would suggest that at the back of Wolfe’s question is a knowledge that fiction in a way currently has been/is failing in the ways Mark Freeman and Jens Brockmeier (2001) formulate: the new types of conflicts, dilemmas, predicaments of the postmodern world can no longer be emplotted within the traditional genres of tragedy, Bildungsroman, adventure story, triumphalist narrative, and so on. As we move into the heart of the postmodern condition, the challenge of achieving some measure of narrative integrity, far from being obviated, may in fact become intensified. Moreover, the very attempt to move away from the self may in fact lead towards it. How, in the face of such multiplicitous arrays of possible selves, is one to find direction about how best to live? And how, in the face of so voluminous a library of possible narratives, is one to determine how best to tell one’s story? At times the ‘path inward’ (as in autobiographical writing) may appear to be the only one to take (2001: 92). But to have called Country of My Skull a novel would have brought about even bigger problems. Using so many TRC submissions, press briefings, interviews and testimonies, and then projecting the text as fiction, and therefore my own imagination, would have been profoundly

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dishonest. I also have to say that my respect for the capacity of the imagination of writers (or my own) took a severe blow during the TRC process. Sometimes I would write down what I remembered of a particularly haunting testimony, and when I checked it against the real testimony, mine was always, always weaker. Add to this the fact that no writer had ever captured or equalled that immense power and rhythm of the translated TRC testimonies in their work or imagined the breadth and depth of depravity that were revealed at the perpetrator hearings. Even those fictional accounts that appeared after the TRC are floue lugspieëlings [faint mirages] of how the testimonies really were. Finally, the ‘fictionalisation’ that the ‘I’ admits to is often nothing more than an effort to protect those who became part of the narrative outside the TRC ambit of public commissioners and testifiers. DB:  As you know, I have been working on Adam Ashforth’s narrative engagement with the subject of witchcraft in Soweto, especially in the book Madumo: A Man Bewitched (2000). Despite his extensive use of fictional techniques (in particular, narration, dialogue and shifting focalisation), Ashforth seems insistent that Madumo should not be considered a novel. In refusing the genre of the novel, he seems to be claiming what Wolfe describes as the ‘built-in’ ‘advantage’ of that analogous form, the New Journalism: the assumption, on the part of the reader, that ‘all this actually happened’, something akin to the ‘autobiographical contract’. As readers, we may question Ashforth’s narrative portrayal of the man he calls Madumo and his suffering, or we may even dispute the significance of his story or the relationship between Ashforth and Madumo, but we cannot – in terms of the conventions of the genre – deny the existence of the man or the fact of his suffering. We are forced into having to engage with Madumo and his bewitchment, without the option of dismissing him as a problematic fictional construct, as – for example – hostile readers might do with David Lurie or Petrus in Coetzee’s Disgrace. In a serious engagement with the question of how to narrate Madumo’s story of spiritual possession, Ashforth seems to find in the shifting, ambiguous and yet also demarcated space of creative non-fiction new possibilities for narration and identification.

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AK:  This is a most amazing observation, Duncan! That one uses nonfiction in order to remove the escape clause for the reader. So maybe it has brought us closer to some kind of distinction of the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Let me try and concretise it into imagery of the ‘Bybelse spieël in die raaisel soort’ [the biblical imagery of seeing the reflection in the mirror].1 I would say the fiction writer is saying: I am making a mirror, and if you stand here, it will assist you with your beingness in the world; the non-fiction writer is saying: I found this mirror, if one stands here, there is this reflection in the mirror – what does it mean? So you can choose different mirror-makers and different places for different reflections; the reader of fiction can dismiss both mirror and reflection as being too manipulated, far-fetched, et cetera. The reader of non-fiction cannot dismiss the non-fiction writer pointing to a particular reflection as being a fabrication. It is up to the non-fiction writer to convince the reader of how much is real reflection and how much is also nothing but manipulation. The non-fiction writer can choose a kind of mirror, small, oval, cracked, et cetera, but she can never make a mirror. Perhaps there is an even better image: the fiction writer takes the photograph, what and how she wants and then develops it. The non-fiction writer uses a found photograph. DB:  Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1988) is a text that is formally close to Ashforth’s and also approaches the question of writing belief (in relation to Australian Aboriginal ‘songlines’ and ‘dreamings’). Chatwin’s solution, after extensive negotiation with his publisher, was to call his narrative a ‘novel of ideas’. AK:  I think The Songlines is a wonderful example of a writer grasping an essence and then manipulating many things to say that thing that he wants to say. Apparently, a lot of it is not correct, and yet he brought a completely new sensibility into the Western world that was not there before. I would rather have The Songlines than to be without it; on the other hand, I would rather have had a more correct version, which would probably have been even more challenging, if less riveting. 1. See 1 Corinthians 13:12.

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DB:  Many of the examples of creative non-fiction that I mentioned at the outset – as well as Ashforth’s and Chatwin’s work – seem to find in the contradictions, fluidities and possibilities of the genre ways of engaging with social and cultural difference, and renegotiating or remaking identities. Your collaborative work with Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele in the book There Was This Goat (2009) is a prime example. AK:  I couldn’t have imagined the testimony of Mrs Konile. But say I decided to make a novel out of it and started to make up all the conversations and thoughts about it. It could still have been an interesting book, but nothing more than a thumbsuck without three real people coming from three different sensibilities allowing the book to explore nooks and cellars that we didn’t even know existed. I found, for example, how often white people expressed their surprise at some of the observations of my black colleagues, but on the radio station where we discussed the book, quite a few black readers phoned in and were astonished about my angle. Which brings me back to the estranged worlds that we are coming from in this country. But I’m still intrigued by this question you raise about ‘writing belief ’. Can you say something more about that? DB:  It’s a tough question, but I think one we have to engage with seriously if we want to make any sense of the society in which we live. One of the reasons why I find There Was This Goat so significant a text is because you, Kopano Ratele and Nosisi Mpolweni venture into the risky territory of trying to think and write into and about beliefs, assumptions, imaginings, realities, which may be very different from your own, but which you credit, respect, are changed by, are humbled before, may also be provoked by. But before I try to answer your question in more academic terms, let me offer you an anecdote, which summed up for me the need to think seriously about writing belief. Sometime in the mid-1990s, when I was working at what was then the University of Natal, Durban, I attended a research seminar in the History Department, in which the paper, like just about all of those in the series, was quite clear that historical materialism was the explanatory paradigm and that the religious or spiritual – if considered at all – was explained as (misguided) responses to social,

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economic and historical conditions. At the end of the seminar I had to hurry across campus to give an English 1 lecture in probably the biggest venue on campus, which holds in the region of 500 people. But I couldn’t get in because there was a prayer meeting going on and the venue was filled to bursting. So in stark, experiential terms, I was faced with the question: how to reconcile the dismissiveness of the 12 (mostly white) academics towards faith, with the apparently sincerely held beliefs of the 500-plus (mostly black) Christians in the lecture theatre? I found it a salutary and humbling experience. I was disconcerted by an apparent arrogance in much of the academy generally towards religious or spiritual faith (as well as the racial and class aspects – mostly white, middle-class academics versus mostly black, mostly support staff). Coupled with that was my own return to Christian faith at that stage in my life, and hence my own struggles to think through the complexities of writing belief in academic contexts. But to take up the question slightly more theoretically. Let me consider three different possibilities and see how far these take us. Firstly, and for me the most interesting scenario is how to write belief that you do not share. Obviously, anthropology, ethnography and religious studies have approached this question quite intensively over many years, but I’m thinking of how you write belief in a nuanced, empathetic way, while retaining some sort of critical perspective. We are in the situation here, I think, of wanting to credit belief, even if we don’t necessarily endorse it. And if we really want to understand a country in which both the census figures and our own lived experience tell us that the overwhelming majority of people believe in some form of supernatural power, then we’d better take the question seriously. For me, where this touches on the conversation we are having about creative non-fiction is that the imaginative shifts, narrative destabilisations, varying focalisations, metaphorical intensities and so on that the genre can employ, alongside more conventional discursive or reportorial prose, allow an approach to belief that can write from both inside and outside; can allow for the complexities and contradictions that such an endeavour necessarily involves. I’ve mentioned Adam Ashforth’s work as to me exemplary in this regard. Harry G. West is another fine example. In his book Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique, he says:

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Like many scholars of sorcery, I place myself in the narrative, producing what James Clifford – drawing on Bakhtin – has referred to as ‘dialogical ethnography’ [.  .  .]. However, whereas other scholars of sorcery have made the story of their apprenticeship the central thread of their narrative – often in the form of accounts of personal journey from incomprehension to understanding – I have rejected this narrative trope. My reasons for doing so derive from the awkward tension I discovered to exist between my experience of studying uwavi [sorcery] in the field and the understanding of uwavi I developed over the years both in the field and ‘back home’. In the field the study of uwavi was sometimes profoundly disorienting. Knowledge gained one day was lost the next as I gathered contradictory evidence or became aware of disparate perspectives (2005: 9). A little further on, West says: In the construction of an ethnographic account, one can scarcely avoid making some sense of the topic at hand. Indeed, as one can scarcely live in a world without seeking to understand it, I have, like the Muedans with whom I conversed, sought to see the unseeable, to know the unknown, to make sense of the senseless. It is quite another thing, however, to suggest that this sense revealed itself, as such, over the course of the journey of my fieldwork. My struggle to make sense of uwavi was continually transformed in various contexts outside the field – in the library, in the seminar room, and in front of the computer screen. This book conveys my understanding of uwavi at the time of its writing. Although it comprises accounts of events and conversations that occurred in the conduct of field research, the chronology of these encounters has yielded in my narrative to another order of presentation, for each of its constituent episodes has come to coexist with the others in my memory, each one interrogating others across boundaries of space and time, each one shedding light or imparting confusion upon the others. The narrative

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not only follows Muedan history but also threads through the logics of uwavi as I eventually came to conceive of them, all the while ferrying back and forth between simplicity and complexity, clarity and ambiguity, certainty and doubt (2005: 9–10). West’s book is an academic monograph, but I think his methodology may resonate with your use of creative non-fiction in many ways, including the sense of ‘cutting and pasting the upper layer, in order to get the second layer told’ (Krog 1998: 171), and also of writing into the narrative your own developing understanding or confusion. The other author I admire in his attempts to write faith is Terry Eagleton. I’ve talked elsewhere about how he uses various fictional techniques in his critical writing on Christianity, in particular shifting focalisation and free-indirect discourse, to produce accounts of Christian belief that are entirely credible to Christian believers, but do not move him out of his own materialist paradigm. Secondly, one needs to think about writing belief from within that belief, not as an evangelist, but as a scholar. I supervised a doctoral student, Nkosinathi Sithole, who produced a very good Master’s thesis on ‘near-death narratives’ in the Church of the Nazarites, and wrote his PhD about the performance of hymns and sacred dance in the church, one of the assumptions of which is that the audience for such performances is partly those who have departed this life for heaven.2 I had a hard time getting his doctoral proposal through the higher degrees committee at the University of KwaZulu-Natal because the objection was raised that there was a methodological problem in his being a member of the church and also writing about it. His counter-argument was that all of the studies of the church – including my own work – had been done by people from outside the church, which had led to certain inaccuracies in the analyses. Now many areas of academia have developed methodologies for self-reflexiveness in writing one’s own position into one’s analysis, especially if one is either an insider or outsider to the society under discussion, and Sithole did indeed engage with this. And he has used some very interesting techniques, including at one point an 2. Sithole’s PhD thesis has since been published as a monograph, Isaiah Shembe’s Hymns and the Sacred Dance in Ibandla Nazaretha (2016).

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extraordinary autobiographical account of his own adult circumcision, to negotiate the complexities of his writing position. But there seems to be a larger assumption that needs to be questioned. One cannot ‘prove’ that political, historical and economic forces are the fundamental and sole determinants in human history: historical materialists believe them to be, and adduce evidence for this in the way that Christians, Muslims or Buddhists adduce evidence for their beliefs and epistemologies. But I’ve yet to hear that it would be methodologically problematic for a materialist or liberal humanist to write from or about his/her own paradigms (and I’ve encountered some pretty evangelical materialists in my time!). Which brings us to the third, and maybe least helpful, aspect of writing belief. What writing isn’t about writing belief? Saying that may be as pointless as the philosophical debate about whether anything exists outside of human perception of it, but perhaps the question is especially salient in relation to creative non-fiction, and in particular your own writing: the Country of My Skull trilogy seems so usefully and insistently to stage the complex processes of sense-making and identity (yes, faith and belief are written through all three books) that make us so wonderfully, contradictorily and infuriatingly human. In particular, in South Africa it seems the genre of creative non-fiction has often involved rethinking whiteness, something that is an explicit focus of yours in the Country of My Skull trilogy.3 AK: Harry G. West’s description sounds like the problem we had in writing about/out of something like ubuntu in There Was This Goat. I have picked it up as the basis of some of the TRC testimonies but could not manage to forge any kind of tool to ‘prove’ that it was there. In Mrs Konile’s testimony it felt completely absent. By moving away from accredited sources to the personal experiences and from academic writing to a conversation, my two colleagues managed with astonishing ease to pinpoint and to describe it. Yet, in the absence of footnotes, we had to work endlessly on the text to find convincing and unsentimental language 3. See Claire Scott’s At the Fault Line: Writing White in South African Literary Journalism (2018) for an exploration of whiteness in South African creative non-fiction, including in Country of My Skull and Begging to Be Black.

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to express this. Our ways of working also determined the form of the book. I did feel squashed between a way in which human epistemology was supposed to base and support itself on something, if not absolutely materialistic, then profoundly Western, and the successful attempts of my colleagues to move beyond the enclosing theoretical lines. It reminded me of how the Afrikaans poet Eugène Marais visited Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd while they were doing research on the /Xam, and how he was told by one of the /Xam that he could speak bird or lion. In other words, not imitating, but conversing. I think my primal obsession is to insist that one can only imagine bird, be bird, if one is living with and like, and one becomes bird as the Bushmen did or the Kaluli so beautifully described by Steven Feld in his book Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression (1990). As Hamlet says, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (1.5.166–7), and the old paradigms are holding one back. But to return to ‘rethinking whiteness’. Ron Kraybill (1995) gives a few to-be-repeated stages or steps as part of a reconciliation process. The first step is to turn away from one another. The second is to redefine oneself and/or one’s group. I think that since 1990 a hell of a lot of turning away and redefining has taken place. Are Afrikaners only apartheid monsters? Are blacks only victims? How black is coloured? Are all whites the same? Et cetera. The third stage is to undertake a small act of trust. This is action that makes oneself vulnerable because one’s survival depends on the other. Millions of South Africans are involved daily in small acts of trust. It is these moments where the edges meet that provide for me the most interesting material for non-fiction. In terms of the imagination, I sometimes get the impression that soapies are the only places where such redefining and acts of trust are being imagined. They pretend we all live ‘normally’ together. A lot of scheming, passion, caring and destroying takes place, but race is seldom the cause or the space of risk. The risk is to have all races living without racial friction. DB:  What has always seemed to me your most ambitious and definitive statement about your use of the genre of creative non-fiction is contained in Country of My Skull:

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‘Hey Antjie, but this is not quite what happened at the workshop,’ says Patrick. ‘Yes, I know, it’s a new story that I constructed from all the other information I picked up over the months about people’s reactions and psychologists’ advice. I’m not reporting or keeping minutes. I’m telling. If I have to say every time that so-and-so said this, and then at another time so-and-so said that, it gets boring. I cut and paste the upper layer, in order to get the second layer told, which is actually the story I want to tell. I change some people’s names when I think they might be annoyed or might not understand the distortions.’ ‘But then you’re not busy with the truth!’ ‘I am busy with the truth . . . my truth. Of course, it’s quilted together from hundreds of stories that we’ve experienced or heard about in the past two years. Seen from my perspective, shaped by my state of mind at the time and now also by the audience I’m telling the story to. In every story there is hearsay, there is a grouping together of things that didn’t necessarily happen together, there are assumptions, there are exaggerations to bring home the enormities of situations, there is downplaying to confirm innocence. And all of this together makes up the country’s truth. So also the lies. And the stories that date from earlier times’ (1998: 170–1). Could you comment on this? AK:  To return to the photographer and photo image. I can let you sit, give you tea, enlarge the photograph, give you a PowerPoint display, but what I cannot or rather should not change is the photo – the way it is. Because that is what I am trying to tell, the second layer, the unchangeable that I have chosen to understand and talk about. DB: I want to push you a little on this. I understand the ethical aspect, and also the personal nature of the narration (it is the ‘country of my skull’, and you have already talked about the importance of the ‘I’ in the narration). Can you say something more about getting the

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‘second layer told, which is actually the story I want to tell’, which you describe as ‘unchangeable’? Are we talking here about the affective story, the penetrating imaginative or metaphorical insight, the emotional ‘truth’ – the kind of thing that readers traditionally go to novels for, rather than to journalism or social history? AK:  It is like when you write a poem. There are the words, sounds and images, and one is shifting, moving, hauling new ones in, in order to make them conform to that other thing which the poem is about. It is hard to describe. It is both layer and context. One makes decisions about what to incorporate and how, based on something, some notion of how the poem or book should sound. So I don’t sit and think, you know I have this European bird in Begging to Be Black, let me find an African bird. I was actually on one level not aware of the different kinds of birds in Begging to Be Black, and yet something in me was busy with the composition or connecting patterns and was pulling those birds in. Maybe it is a question of being responsive or empathetic to the things that connect within the context that I am creating. So the reason why one chooses to describe A and not B, mentions C and not D, is because one is busy picking out the pattern that one has discovered. But what does this do with the integrity of what is really happening? By leaving out D, am I not distorting what is happening in order to make reality fit the particular pattern that I want to expose? What is the validity of my pattern then? This brings me to ‘voice’. One often says how this or that young writer is still trying to ‘find her voice’. What does that mean? And what is at stake when one’s found voice becomes public? When only writing Afrikaans poetry (during the apartheid years) I was often asked: who do you write for? I found that easy to answer: for nobody. I have/hear/sense something inside me that wants to be said and my only loyalty/energy lies towards making this happen as clearly as possible. But looking back I can see that I was ignoring the voice I was forming during those years. The voice that turned what was picked up by the creative self into words/ sounds. Here I am today because of this particular voice. How does it get and keep its integrity? And maybe that is what is bothering me most about some of today’s fiction: I find so many gaps, so much papered

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over non-knowledge, so few attempts to complexify the very question of living here and now, that the writers whose voices I trust I can count on my one hand. Let me give an example of the kind of choices relating to integrity. In A Change of Tongue I describe the disastrous interview I had with Mandela at Qunu.4 Not long after that encounter I was invited with my whole family to have dinner with Mandela at his Cape Town house. So I, my husband and children then had dinner with a charming Mandela who told my children in detail what a brave and remarkable person I was. It was one of those immensely special moments of one’s life. So when I write the book, the dinner could be the rectification of the way Mandela treated me at the interview. But to write about the dinner was not only very difficult, for me it affected the integrity of my ‘voice’. I thought long and hard about what to do. To cut the piece would affect Mandela’s stature: because he wanted to ‘make up’ for the treatment. Now why won’t I give him that? Do I sacrifice him so that I can keep my integrity? One can say, yes, that is what I did. But I think I did something much more interesting than the usual Mandela story: I substituted the dinner with a frank discussion I had with somebody about him in which the exploration of him as a leader went much deeper than the other story allowed. DB: At a recent conference, a prominent South African literary and cultural studies scholar commented that she had, over the past few years, found South African fiction unsatisfying, and that she was more engaged with writing in other genres, whether they be journalism, creative nonfiction or social history. I was reminded of this by the dialogue that occurs near the end of Begging to Be Black: ‘No, I can’t, I don’t want to write novels.’ ‘Why not? With novels you can explore the inner psyche of characters; you can imagine, for example, being black. So what is it about non-fiction that you don’t want to give up?’

4. See Chapter 11 in Krog (2003).

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‘The strangeness. Whatever novelistic elements I may use in my non-fiction work, the strangeness is not invented. The strangeness is real, and the fact that I cannot ever really enter the psyche of somebody else, somebody black. The terror and loneliness of that inability is what I don’t want to give up on.’ ‘But how will you live together in your country (or mine) if you don’t begin to imagine one another?’ ‘I want to suggest that at this stage imagination for me is overrated’ (Krog 2009: 267–8). There’s a lot going on in that passage and – despite the sense of the failures of imagination – the imagination is very much present. Your whole narrative is shot through with imaginative projections and associations, but they constantly negotiate with or mediate ‘the real’. AK:  But it is a particular real. I am not writing research as in an academic article, presenting the proven/argued. I am exploring the seams, the edges. I had some wonderful discussions with Johan Degenaar, just before he retired, and remember he once stopped and said: no wait, let me rephrase, I see you work entirely in images. So if I describe Kroonstad in A Change of Tongue, I am not busy with Kroonstad; I am trying to say something else using Kroonstad. Although Kroonstad immediately becomes a metaphor, I need you to understand that Kroonstad is a real place, so that you can explore with me this ‘realness’ I am trying to communicate through Kroonstad. And what is this realness? They are falling apart and people are suffering and scared and surviving in many very complex ways. Kroonstad becomes contextualised patterns. In itself it displays all the notions of a once-proud white town in the flux of changes – I make my choices of what to describe based on patterns that show up what Gregory Bateson (1979) called first-order connections; I describe it in such a way (choosing to mention A, but not B) to expose the pattern of the town in comparison with that of the country to make second-order connections and so forth. Why don’t I imagine a town and country? I think (because I have never even attempted to write fiction) to imagine a town is to make it whole, to imagine it wholly and from this wholeness decide what to describe/tell. What I am saying through non-

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fiction is that I have problems, I cannot see this town in its entirety, but look, here are some patterns and they are saying: it is complex, wholeness is (im)possible, but here are patterns. DB: I’m reminded of Wolfe’s (no doubt hyperbolic) comment about the New Journalism in this regard. He points to the tension between the New Journalists’ view that novelists in America in the 1960s were abandoning the complexities of their society for increasingly rarified imaginative flights, and yet their own anxiety that – despite this – their work as journalists was nevertheless inferior, because it was ‘journalism’ and not ‘literature’, little imagining the impact their writing would have: And yet in the early 1960s a curious new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego, had begun to intrude into the tiny confines of the feature statusphere. It was in the nature of a discovery. This discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would . . . read like a novel. Like a novel, if you get the picture. This was the sincerest form of homage to The Novel and to those greats, the novelists, of course. Not even journalists who pioneered in this direction doubted for a moment that the novelist was the reigning literary artist, now and forever. All they were asking for was the privilege of dressing up like him . . . until the day when they themselves would work up their nerve and go into the shack and try it for real. . . . They were dreamers, all right, but one thing they never dreamed of. They never dreamed of the approaching irony. They never guessed for a minute that the work they would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature’s main event (1996: 21–2). AK:  I find again that I differ from Wolfe. I respect a good novelist like Coetzee more than any non-fiction I have read about the country. Disgrace has ripped open more debates and conversations about South Africa and colour than any newspaper article or non-fiction book ever did. So a good novel is immensely powerful. Maybe something is to be said about the quality of novels he is talking about. So personally I am not interested

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in how we imagine one another, because we don’t know one another well enough, but in how we are, really – how have we survived, how have we loved and betrayed? I have read some fiction about known characters or towns and could sometimes just cry about how some writers simply do not manage to capture the contradicting layers of what was available. DB:  There are key moments in the Country of My Skull trilogy where you engage self-reflexively with, and flag for the reader, fiction-making as part of your narrative strategy. It’s something that is somewhat unusual in the genre of creative non-fiction because – while it opens imaginative space and points to a different notion of truth-telling – it simultaneously denies what we discussed earlier, what Wolfe identifies as the ‘built-in’ ‘advantage’ of such writing: that the reader knows ‘all of this actually happened’. AK:  If you read carefully, you will see that these flags always refer to technique or strategy and never to the inherent content. Most of these fictionalisations are to protect people while at the same time signalling that telling a story about the truth is a complicated business. DB:  What limits do you set yourself in this regard? What duty do you have to the integrity of voice and identity, to the ‘authorship’ of ideas? For example, you mentioned to me in conversation that the idea of ‘knowing someone’s heartbeat’ was something that had been spoken to you outside of the narrative context of Lesotho, in which it finally appears in Begging to Be Black. AK:  This is virtually impossible, but let me try. A woman invited me for lunch to discuss possible ways of working together with her NGO [nongovernmental organisation]. Partly explaining why she had to cancel the previous meeting, she briefly told me that she was away because her grandmother had died. And then she told me the story about the heartbeat in a kind of effort to explain why she feels a bit emotional. Thereafter, we had about an hour-and-a-half conversation about the possibilities of working together. Now, of all the many things said and told that afternoon to each other, why would this piece stick in my mind? I remember nothing else of what was said that afternoon and none of our

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plans materialised anyway. So why would these sentences be preserved in my mind’s eye so clearly that I can still see her hand resting for a moment on her chest where her heart is as she was saying it? It is also because of these sentences that I can remember the cafe in Observatory where we sat, she with her back to the wall. Her other hand was on the table around her wineglass. Is this already the moment that the arbitrariness of choice and representation of reality start? Or is it that the memory has retained everything and will pull something out the moment that a connective pattern is found? I have noticed through the years as a poet that I also have what I have come to call a creative IQ – something that subconsciously and unconsciously selects and holds things like images, stories, words, feelings somewhere. While I would forget major things, or be unable to remember a single thing of an important event, I would be able to remember something completely insignificant for years and years. These things are kept until I am working on something – then suddenly like a fish hook, it is as if the thing I am working on is dredging up this cluster of gathered at random and now suddenly related things. Now I am on this page. I am in Lesotho after a conversation with Bonnini, which had opened up a lot of thinking around being interconnected in my mind. The story of the heartbeat comes up. Its essence of interconnectedness fits what I am busy saying, but it has nothing to do with Lesotho or Bonnini. The woman who told me cannot form any part of the story (she does not fit into the larger pattern of Lesotho, Kroonstad and Berlin) or the unimportant lunch. To make it real non-fiction I need to phone her and say: I want to use this, these are the words as I remember them, is it okay for you if I use them like this? Several things can happen: she can say: no, you may not use them, as I am also writing a book about my life (which I suspect is the case); or she can say: yes, and everything is solved; or she can say: no, this is not quite what I said and give me a broader or weaker description. But because I have asked her, I now have to use it without any change and ascribe it to her real name and make her a character in the book to validate the inclusion. Now if that is to happen, then she will obviously want to read the book first and okay what is being said by her. So for me the cost to reality becomes too high for these few sentences, which in the end lose nothing

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of their validity without her being attached to them and in contrast may lose the coherent power they currently have through meddling. And here comes the second and bigger arbitrariness: how do I use this? For me the essence, the vertebrae that are to form the spinal pattern, in other words what may not be changed, is the notion that such an intimacy can develop between the grandmother and her granddaughter that a kind of calibration of heartbeats, a through-bodily-awareness of one another, was possible. And it was important that it was a story told by a black woman. The rest can be negotiated by the fictional elements I am using to tell the story – the cut and paste, so that the connecting second layer or pattern of what I want to tell can stay intact. So initially I wanted the horse-rider person, Clement, to tell it as we go on our way to the waterfall. But does it not interfere with the integrity of the piece? Do I know enough about interconnectedness to know that a black man could have had the same experience? I believe that I don’t know enough to make that choice. So it must stay a woman. There are horsewomen in Lesotho, but I had had no contact with them. Then I thought, no let me say that I was remembering this story as I was sitting on the horse. So I was on a horse, I heard the story of the heartbeat, but the two didn’t happen simultaneously as on the page. What was important to me was not the time breach, but that the essence of why that story was gathered, preserved and re-presented by me kept its integrity. But I could have misheard her, or my memory could have preserved only part of what it wanted to hear – that is true. But that is why the ‘I’ is brought in, to warn the reader, things are as this ‘I’ remembers and tells them. More importantly, by combining the strong visuality of the horse-riding incident with the philosophy of being interconnected I used exactly the strategies that Scarry (2001) is talking about – making moments real by using ‘radiant ignition’, ‘rarity’, ‘dyadic addition or subtraction’ and ‘stretching, folding and tilting’. Let me give you a more problematic example. I wrote a poem when I was sixteen years old and moved to a new and smarter class in high school where the kids were who took Latin and whose fathers did professional jobs in town. I felt utterly insecure, ugly and poor, but John, who in the end married me, was extremely kind towards me. So I wrote a sentimental poem about this unworthy girl, with the pimples and the nylon jersey, thanking the boy for being kind towards her. Many years afterwards I

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read that the South African writer Mark Behr said that when he read the poem at school he was floored: that was how he said he wanted to write; he wanted to have the guts to tell about pimples and a cheap jersey. Now you have to know, I hardly had any pimples at school and because my father was a wool farmer, it would have been over his dead body that any of us would wear nylon. Among all the images in the poem Behr picked those two ‘lies’ as the strongest and gutsiest parts. My creative instinct told me that to describe me as I was would not make the reaching out of the boy such a splendid thing, but if I had pimples and synthetic clothes, it would. But let me try to engage with narrative integrity from a theoretical point of view. According to Freeman and Brockmeier, narrative integrity comes about through an open and decentred, multiple self whose many possible voices nevertheless remain highly individuated and selfdefined, whose narrated life embodies the adamant refusal of binding and substantialised character ideals. They describe narrative integrity not only as ‘harmony of proportion or beauty of form as principles of narrative composition’, but also as ‘the coherence and depth of one’s ethical commitments. Narrative integrity encompasses both aesthetics and ethics’ (2001: 76). This truly does not help me much, although I always have as many ‘I’ voices present in my work as possible, with enough space in which the ‘I’s can differ and confess to contradictions. But I found something else: according to H. Porter Abbott in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (2002), one uses an implied author ‘to assume wholeness’ in the sense that one assumes that a single creative sensibility lies behind the narrative. That sensibility has selected and shaped its events, the order in which they are narrated, the entities involved, the language, the sequence of shots. When reading this way, we read ‘intentionally’, says Abbott, and it is in keeping with a sensibility that intended these effects. Some would say that this is the only valid way of reading a narrative. This is the way we usually behave when we interpret: that is we assume that a narrative like a sentence comes from someone bent on communicating (2002: 95).

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I would say that I stick my neck out: I say: I have a pattern that I am ‘bent on communicating’; I present myself as a single creative sensibility that has selected and shaped the narrative presented to you. You will read it not as coming from an omnipotent oracle, but as a very personal sensibility of a particular reality presented by me. But unlike the fiction writer, you can hold me to the truth, you can judge me right through the story on the ways I respect the integrity of that truth. On the other hand, maybe it is at the same time safer. People have rejected Coetzee because they have conflated the author with Prof. Lurie, but the non-fiction writer can say, this is not me, don’t blame me, this is a real character. DB: The notion of ‘creative non-fiction’ has a long history. As Marc Weingarten (2005: 10–14) argues, its roots stretch far beyond the 1960s New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion or Hunter S. Thompson, or the non-fiction novel of Truman Capote, conservatively to at least Jonathan Swift’s eighteenth-century political satire, Charles Dickens’s ‘Street Sketches’ for the Morning Chronicle (1836) under the pseudonym Boz, the writing of Joseph Pulitzer in the nineteenth century, and Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1902). Are there any authors who have engaged you, or seemed to open up the possibilities of the form? AK: In a strange way it is precisely the fiction writers that open possibilities of non-fiction. The origin of the form of Begging to Be Black is, on the one hand, because of the dramatist and novelist – and a good friend – Tom Lanoye who said to me: ‘Rewrite the murder story as fiction. Go into the heads of the killers – it would be fascinating to read.’ At the same time, there is Coetzee’s Foe and Petrus in Disgrace. Both these novels admit current impossibilities to imagine oneself into black, and for me through the testimony of Mrs Konile to imagine myself black and poor. I have never heard that language and simply can’t imagine it. So in a way it is the questioning in fiction (Coetzee), the flaws in fiction, and the way black writers like Njabulo Ndebele are presenting narratives that have inspired me.

Finding My Way 133  CHAPTER SIX

Oral Literature in South Africa Twenty Years On

This chapter was initially delivered as a keynote address at the conference ‘Orature in South Africa: An Arc to the Future’ in 2015, which was coupled with a joint project of the same name, headed by Andrew van der Vlies of Queen Mary College, University of London, and Deborah Seddon of Rhodes University, to produce a digital archive of historical and contemporary orality and performance from South Africa. The context is important, as I sought to offer a retrospective view on the field of orality and performance studies in South Africa, assessing what has been achieved, what may have happened inadvertently or, worryingly, what some of the significant implications have been, what challenges remain, and how we may think of or rethink orality and performance studies in a present and future changing at an almost inconceivable pace. Orality and performance have, of course, been with us as far back as we can trace in human histories, and again to adapt J.M. Coetzee’s famous metaphor of narrative being like a cockroach, which survives no matter what, orality and performance will no doubt outlive us all, though likely in forms that we cannot yet begin to imagine or comprehend. Orality studies, however, in the sense of academic studies (rather than, for example, discussions among performers themselves about technique and evaluation) have a far more recent history and a somewhat less clear future, though I am by no means pessimistic about that. Much of the pioneering work on oral literature in southern Africa occurred within the context of colonisation: whether by missionaries seeking to understand their prospective converts and their languages more adequately; magistrates or governors wanting to find ‘better’ ways to govern; state ethnographers or linguists in the service and advocacy of empire (often with explicitly social-Darwinist agendas); or an admixture of the above with apparently genuine interest. The legacy, in the work of 133

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people like James Stuart, A.T. Bryant, Henry Callaway or Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, is an invaluable archive of material and scholarship, though one requiring careful contextualisation. There have also been significant and groundbreaking studies of oral literature by black scholars, in particular H.I.E. Dhlomo (1977, 1993), B.W. Vilakazi (1945, 1993), A.C. Jordan (1973), D.P. Kunene (1971) and Mazisi Kunene (1961), which continue to inform orality studies today. With the ‘retribalising’ policy of the National Party following its coming to power in South Africa in 1948, studies of oral literature – especially in departments of African languages – became, in some cases, problematically entangled with the ideology of apartheid and its promotion of fossilised and essentialised notions of ‘ethnic identity’ and ‘racial otherness’; or they restricted themselves to the ‘safe’ areas of lexical study or morphology over the more challenging and resistant potential of oral texts in South Africa. Nevertheless, crucial studies appeared by M. Damane and P.B. Sanders (1974), Aaron C. Hodza and George Fortune (1979), Trevor Cope (1968), Isaac Schapera (1965), and D. Rycroft and A.B. Ngcobo (1988) – studies that deserve renewed attention from scholars today. Along with the studies mentioned above, Ruth Finnegan’s wide ranging Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance and Context (1978), Jeff Opland’s pioneering study Xhosa Oral Poetry: Aspects of a Black South African Tradition (1983) and Liz Gunner’s mammoth two-volume doctoral thesis ‘Ukubonga Nezibongo: Zulu Praising and Praises’ (1984) were foundational in establishing the field of oral literature study in South Africa. As is evident in reading much of this pioneering work, until fairly recently, studies of oral literature worldwide tended to be either anthropological/historical or literary-formalist in approach (I include on both sides of this distinction scholars working in the hoarily defined area of ‘folklore’). With some notable exceptions (in relation to southern Africa, particularly the work of David B. Coplan, Deborah James, Veit Erlmann, John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff), anthropological and historical studies have emphasised the role of the text as a carrier of cultural or social information and paid little attention to literary form. Literary studies, in turn, have tended to remove forms from the time, place and circumstances out of which they emerged. The ideas of Milman

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Parry, who in the 1920s and 1930s studied the Homeric tradition and its parallels with modern Slavic epics, and those of his student Albert Lord, have dominated discussions of orality in departments of literature. Both Parry and Lord treat oral literature as a universal genre characterised by common techniques of composition and delivery, rather than as emerging in distinct forms in disparate historical circumstances. Certainly Parry’s emphasis on the performer’s ability to improvise directed much-needed attention to the individual-aesthetic shaping of material in contrast to the anthropological reading, which located the poem or story in the ‘collective consciousness’ or ‘memory’ of the ‘tribe’ or ‘band’. However, Parry is unable to account for the roles of oral texts within specific societies. Instead, as Finnegan argued, criticism of the Parry-Lord school tends to confine itself to the ‘study of detailed stylistic points and formulaic systems leading to statistical conclusions’ (1976: 127). In 1989 a rather scruffy-looking, cardboard-bound book appeared. It emerged out of a one-day seminar run by the Centre of  West African Studies at the University of Birmingham and was published by the centre itself. I am referring to Karin Barber and P.F. de Moraes Farias’s edited collection, Discourse and Its Disguises: The Interpretation of African Oral Texts (1989). It appeared at the same time as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s much-vaunted The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989), and was in its own way as influential in its field of study as The Empire Writes Back was on postcolonial studies. The seminar focused on the apparent impasse between the somewhat decontextualised formalism of the literary scholars and the approach of anthropologists/historians for whom oral texts were simply sources of social or historical information. ‘What seemed to be required,’ the editors argue, ‘was an approach that acknowledged simultaneously the historicity and textuality of oral texts, that combined a sociology with a poetics of oral literature’ (Barber and De Moraes Farias 1989: 1). For them, ‘the issue was how to put textuality into history, and history back into textuality’ (2). It was an approach I found extremely engaging and productive, and which informed my work at the time, as well as that of many scholars in literary studies, anthropology and ethnomusicology. Why a retrospective look at orality and performance studies twenty years on? I argue that there was a key set of publications clustering loosely

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around the median point of 1995, admittedly often with somewhat divergent imperatives and methodologies, which established the field of a more theorised study of orality in South Africa, working at the nexus of textuality and historicity, whether explicitly informed by Barber and De Moraes Farias’s argument or not. Leroy Vail and Landeg White’s Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History (1991), Isabel Hofmeyr’s ‘We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told’: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom (1993) and Karin Barber’s ‘I Could Speak until Tomorrow’: Oríkì, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town (1991) are three landmark studies still frequently referenced today. Barber’s study, of course, focuses on material from Nigeria, not South Africa, but its exploration of the kinds of approaches outlined in Discourse and Its Disguises in an extended study of bodies of oral performance was extremely suggestive for scholars in South Africa and elsewhere, including my own work in Voicing the Text: South African Oral Poetry and Performance (1998) and the edited collection Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa (1999). Russell H. Kaschula’s edited volume Foundations in Southern African Oral Literature (1993) collected and reprinted seminal papers and articles on the study of oral literature from the first half of the twentieth century alongside a few slightly later pieces. It was invaluable in giving contemporary researchers a sense of the history of scholarship on which they could build. Liz Gunner and Mafika Gwala’s anthology Musho! Zulu Popular Praises (published in the United States in 1991 and in 1994 in South Africa), with a significant 52-page critical introduction, dispatched the notion that the only Zulu praises worthy of critical attention were those of significant male leaders. Megan Biesele’s Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/’hoan (1993) was bold enough to introduce the concepts of ideology, economics and gender relations into the arena of Khoisan studies, previously demarcated as the terrain of myth and folklore. Stewart Brown’s edited volume of chapters on orality in Africa and the diaspora, The Pressures of the Text: Orality, Texts and the Telling of Tales (1995), took the significant work of Discourse and Its Disguises to broader geographical and intellectual terrains. Liz Gunner’s edited volume, Politics and Performance: Theatre, Poetry and Song in Southern Africa

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(1994), offered comparative studies across South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia, while the volume she co-edited with Graham Furniss, Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature (1995), placed studies of South African orality and performance in conversation with performances and critical work across the African continent. Harold Scheub’s collection The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid (1996) reproduced an extraordinary range of Swati, Xhosa, Ndebele and Zulu narratives between the Sharpeville massacre and the Soweto uprising, which are powerful and compelling. Jeff Opland’s Xhosa Poets and Poetry (1998) – a follow-up to his 1983 study – took his work into challenging new realms, such as the complex interplays between performance and print in newspapers and mission presses. The ethnomusicologist Carol Ann Muller combined intense fieldwork with highly theorised analysis in her account of women’s performance genres in the Church of the Nazarites in the monograph Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire: Nazarite Women’s Performance in South Africa (1999). In her study Songs of the Women Migrants: Performance and Identity in South Africa (1999), the anthropologist Deborah James examined the performance and mediation of migrant women’s identities through song genres such as kiba and others. David B. Coplan explored textualities of identity, migrancy and travel in his study In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants (1994). And although it does not quite fit in with my ‘twenty years on’ argument, I must include Russell H. Kaschula’s The Bones of the Ancestors Are Shaking: Xhosa Oral Poetry in Context (2002), which is valuable both for its critical insights and its publication of poems from the nineteenth century through to praises for Mandela after his release from prison, Joe Slovo and even the national football team Bafana Bafana.1 I need to add a caveat here. It would be inaccurate to assume that the work of Barber, De Moraes Farias and the other authors influenced by their thinking occasioned a radical break from older models in the field of orality and performance studies. Aspects of formalism (especially the Parry-Lord model) and the folkloric are still 1. By far the majority of these publications are from Wits University Press, and we should acknowledge the significant role of this publisher in establishing and promoting this field of study.

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evident in even the most recent publications of some scholars, Opland and Scheub being notable examples. These studies, along with those that preceded them, had profound effects, which should not be underestimated. Chief among these were the legitimising of the study of the oral and performative, including developing the paradigms and methodologies to do so; undermining social-Darwinist understandings of the relations between orality and literacy, fundamental to colonial thinking, but having a surprisingly and stubbornly insistent afterlife; demonstrating and insisting upon the aesthetic and intellectual validity of performance genres and the individuals and societies involved; recovering voices or providing entry for them into the academy; and broadening the scope and possibilities of literary study, anthropology, ethnomusicology, oral history and more broadly study in the humanities. A crucial contribution made by such studies is also that they stand as a corrective to the English-language, elite-genre, print focus of much work in postcolonial studies, which I would like to explore a little further. It should be noted, though, that the potential of this corrective has not been fully realised, as orality and postcolonial studies have not adequately engaged each other. The lack of engagement by postcolonial scholars in South Africa (and elsewhere) with the oral and the performative may be attributable in part to a wariness of the relative lack of historicisation or theorisation in the institutional practices of oral studies in the past, as well as to larger resistances to the oral within literary studies itself, but I think certain difficulties within postcolonial studies are also causative. In particular, the potentially homogenising effect of the postcolonial studies model, as well as problems within its conception of agency and silence on the part of the colonised, need further scrutiny. In its overarching theorisation of coloniser-colonised and centremargin relations, postcolonial studies has often constructed a homogenising grand narrative, which is insufficiently cognisant of the particularities of local histories and tends to elide specific voice or erase any distinctiveness of identity or action, even tilting, on occasion, ‘towards a description of all kinds of oppression and discursive control’, as Stephen Slemon notes (1994: 22). In her eloquent, if polemical, essay,

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‘African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism’, Karin Barber makes the point forcefully: The ‘postcolonial’ criticism of the 1980s and 1990s – which both continues and inverts the ‘Commonwealth’ criticism inaugurated in the 1960s – has promoted a binarised, generalised model of the world which has had the effect of eliminating African language expression from view. This model has produced an impoverished and distorted picture of ‘the colonial experience’ and the place of language in that experience. It has maintained a centre-periphery polarity which both exaggerates and simplifies the effects of the colonial imposition of European languages. It turns the colonising countries into unchanging monoliths, and the colonised into a homogenised token: ‘that most tedious, generic hold-all, “the postcolonial Other” ’, as McClintock puts it – an Other whose experience is determined so overwhelmingly by his or her relation to the metropolitan centre that class, gender and other local historical and social pressures are elided. Despite intermittent claims to specificity, this model blocks a properly historical, localised understanding of any scene of colonial and post-Independence literary production in Africa (Barber 1999: 125). This grand narrative, she continues, quoting Robert J.C. Young, is centrally concerned with empire’s inscription of itself, and pays only the most glancing attention to colonised peoples themselves, despite apparently being impelled by their needs: In so far as it is invoked at all, the indigenous discourse appears only fleetingly, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, conjured up almost inadvertently; it crosses the path of colonial criticism obliquely, metaphorically, ambivalently and evasively, only to advertise its own inaccessibility. The theoretical effect is to consign ‘native’ discourses to the realms of the unknowable, or to imply that they were displaced, erased or absorbed by the dominant colonial discourses (Barber 1999: 128–9).

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The effect of this kind of argument is to problematise the notion of agency for the colonised: ‘What actually happened,’ Barber reminds us, ‘was not only, or always, the result of colonial policies’ (1999: 141) – a position supported by Benita Parry (1994), among others. A proper engagement with orality and performance studies, such as those listed above, makes this kind of position utterly untenable (even if Barber is caricaturing somewhat). There are, however, challenges that I think we need to address in the study of oral literature. In her review of Megan Biesele’s book Women Like Meat, Isabel Hofmeyr expresses a slight concern at its ‘sweeping and deterministic mode-of-production argument’ (1999: 23) in which the texts are analysed and validated in terms of their social functionality. It is a trend evident in much of the work of the time, including my own, as scholars sought to argue for the importance and legitimacy of such material.2 It is evident in the titles, subtitles or section titles of many of the studies referred to above, in which oral texts are analysed in relation to political power, the mediation of identity, the expression of agency and opposition, and so on. Here are some examples: ‘Power and the Praise Poem’; ‘The Folkore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/’hoan’; ‘Power, Marginality and Oral Literature’; ‘Orality and the Power of the State’; ‘Representing Power Relations’; and ‘Mediators and Communicative Strategies’. I am not arguing that this was wrong at the time, but I am concerned about the lingering effects of this approach. Even at the height of the theory wars, when as I have argued the ‘literary’ as ‘literary’ was something of an embarrassment to critics, I do not think the novel, play or lyric poem were ever held to such strict socio-political account. At the end of Chapter 1, I argued: I find myself thinking towards a literary scholarship that is more comfortable with the unpredictability, contrariness and unruliness of the literary; that is not embarrassed by the affective, nor feels the need to bracket it off or explain its ‘functionality’; that 2. In my later work on rap I did, however, specifically try to account for the genre’s ‘pleasure’ and ‘play’ alongside its real engagement with social, political and economic issues (Brown 2006: 153–86).

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deploys theory as it is useful, rather than being disciplined by it or – worse – using ‘theory’ to discipline ‘literature’. I am thinking about a scholarship that is less monumental and institutionally proclaimed; that is instead more nimble and also more humble; that is less sure about its own grounds of working and its aims, but is clear that there is a great deal at stake – the very notions of what it means to be human, humane, civil, compassionate. It is a mode of reading, thinking – living – that is potentially more attuned to the vicious, beautiful, transnational, parochial, hopeful, hopelessly betrayed place that is postapartheid South Africa. I would want something of this approach to permeate the study of orality and performance genres. Another concern in considering orality and performance studies ‘twenty years on’, which is no doubt symptomatic of the ‘nation building’ agenda of the mid-1990s in the wake of the first democratic election, is that some studies were overtly or tacitly (unconsciously?) informed by a nationalist agenda, especially in the case of literary scholars seeking to create more inclusive literary histories (I include myself here). At its worst, the national model understands orality as something localised and of the past. Indeed, despite the best efforts of a range of scholars to argue otherwise, for many literary scholars and especially literary historians, orality remains only an originary presence. It tends to be adduced as a gesture towards precolonial societies and then end-stopped around the time of the establishment of the mission presses. When I saw the title of this conference and project, in which orature was ‘an arc into the future’, I was delighted. Despite abundant evidence that orality and performance are alive and well, they remain, for some critics, something that can be referenced and mercifully forgotten. This tendency can be illustrated by the recent Cambridge History of South African Literature, edited by David Attwell and Derek Attridge, discussed in chapters 1 and 2. In their introduction they say of the field of South African literature: Several literary traditions, oral and written, have fed into the complex array of verbal productions charted in this volume, at

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times influencing or infiltrating one other, and at other times ignoring or challenging one another. From indigenous folktales to European elite art, these traditions have been constantly reworked and reinvented, creating an extensive body of literary art that continues to grow, despite the smallness of the home market and very limited financial means of most potential readers (Attwell and Attridge 2012: 1). The phrase ‘from indigenous folk-tales to European elite art’ may or may not involve a set of developmental assumptions, but more worrying is the fact that their study follows the fairly conventional positioning of the oral and performative as a point of origin and historical record, which implies a conception of the literary and aesthetic that is insufficiently responsive to the possibilities and insurrections of the oral-performative in the present. Michael Chapman argues correctly in this regard: The character of the southern African region ensures that the category of the oral retains both a living and interpretative significance. As in many configurations of the South of the world, the traditional, the modern and the postmodern exist audibly and visibly in simultaneous and antagonistic relationship to the life of the present day (2015: 149). In talking about the continued presence and significance of the oral and performative, I do not just mean rap and hip hop, which are genres with long histories. The single widely regarded as the first rap song released commercially, ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by the Sugarhill Gang, appeared 40 years ago in 1979, around 22 years before many of our students were born, and a song like ‘Lose Yourself ’ by Eminem, a rap standard by any measure, is already eighteen years old, released before most of our students entered Grade 1. While there are certainly performance genres that remain locally specific, in terms of performers, audience and genre, orality and performance have in many cases become decidedly transnational in reference and reach. Orality in the present – as a range of unruly global genres that insist on being heard, but also resist critical containment – demands a somewhat different response.

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For me, some of the most interesting critical work on orality and performance recently in South Africa has been conducted by scholars who approach the field equipped with the theoretical skills and abilities that come from a grounding in mainstream literary studies, especially literary theory. I would divide them into two, possibly distinct but certainly overlapping categories. There are scholars like Nkosinathi Sithole and Mbongiseni Buthelezi who are extremely proficient in the languages of the work they are researching and so can combine the traditional fieldwork approach of collecting materials and interviewing performers with sophisticated understandings of processes of transcription and translation, a nuanced sense of the ambiguities and contradictions of their own positions (both are insiders and outsiders in the societies with which they engage) and an ability to deploy theory in analysis. Then there are scholars like Michael Wessels and Ashlee Neser who work with texts in English translation only, but use theory to interrogate conceptual terms and modes of analysis that are frequently uncritically deployed in oral studies, so producing new, challenging readings of materials previously read rather differently.3 Let me elaborate. Sithole is a member of Ibandla Nazaretha (the Church of the Nazarites). He has an undergraduate degree in African literature and an Honours in English. For his Master’s and doctoral theses, the latter of which was published as a monograph in 2016, he conducted research on near-death narratives and hymn performance and dance in the church. He was theoretically adept enough to negotiate his position as both church member and scholar, and actually to make this a significant advantage in his work (no easy feat, as the church itself is very hierarchical). The Church of the Nazarites has been the subject of a great deal of scholarship, but in almost all cases conducted by white researchers from outside the church. Sithole’s work brought to light a great deal of material that had not yet been published, provided greater insight into the church than had been possible previously and also corrected some of the theoretical misconceptions and analyses of previous studies.

3. Michael Wessels’s tragic and untimely death in 2018 brought an end to the career of one of our most thoughtful and insightful scholars.

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Buthelezi came to his postgraduate work with an undergraduate degree in drama and performance and English, and an English Honours degree. His Master’s and doctoral work involved uncovering an alternative history to the ‘official’ Zulu, Buthelezi and Ndwandwe narratives. This was accomplished through an analysis of official izibongo (praise poems), whether already transcribed or recorded by himself, as well as ‘less official’ praises and narratives. Not only did he have to engage in a similar insider/ outsider negotiation to Sithole, but his personal safety was of grave concern in the overheated identity politics of KwaZulu-Natal. His ability as a literary scholar with excellent skills in isiZulu allowed him to read against the grain of texts, to pick out contradictions and dissonances, to deconstruct their rhetorics of power and also to read sensitively for the ways in which other possible narratives were being constructed. The result is some of the most incisive and insightful analysis to have appeared in the field for some time. To move on to scholars working on texts in English translation, when I first heard that Wessels was proposing a Foucauldian reading of the /Xam Bushman material in the Bleek and Lloyd archives, I have to be honest and say that I thought this might be an example of literary theory gone mad. But his work has convinced me otherwise. His book Bushman Letters: Interpreting /Xam Narratives (2010), which is based on his doctoral thesis, is to me a groundbreaking study. Wessels uses literary theory, chiefly but not only Michel Foucault, to examine the genealogy of some of the terms, conceptual categories and critical assumptions that have assumed currency in oral studies and anthropology and have directed interpretations (including my own), without scholars and readers challenging the values, behaviours and epistemologies that may be implied by the terms, and what their origins might be. The category of ‘trickster’ is one he explores at some length, drawing on Jung and Radin, among others. Once these founding concepts and categories are opened for reappraisal, new, more self-reflexive readings become possible and the archive begins to unfold rather differently. Like Wessels, in her book Stranger at Home: The Praise Poet in Apartheid South Africa (2011), which is also based on her doctoral thesis, Neser seeks – using insights derived from literary theory – to offer new readings of material that has been extensively covered, in this case in

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the scholarship of Jeff Opland. Opland’s work with and on the Xhosa imbongi (praise poet) David Yali-Manisi is extremely well known, and Opland has himself written an autobiographical account of his personal and professional relationship with Manisi in The Dassie and the Hunter: A South African Meeting (2005). Opland recorded Manisi performing on public occasions before leaders at significant gatherings, in one-on-one meetings with him, and during lecture tours they did together, during which Opland would explain the form of izibongo and Manisi would then perform a poem. To take one crucial aspect of Neser’s argument, she engages with a fundamental and consistent distinction that Opland makes in his analysis of Manisi’s work. He distinguishes between ‘performances’, which take place before, say, a Xhosa leader and assembly, and ‘demonstrations’, which might be for a group of students or academics, following a lecture in which Opland had explained the genre of izibongo. Behind Opland’s distinction appear to lie assumptions about ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ aesthetic events and engagements and those ‘displaying’ a technique or skill. Using, among other things, performance theory, Neser argues that the poems Manisi did for students in a lecture theatre are as much ‘performances’ as those before a Xhosa leader, and that Manisi was skilful enough a poet to be able to negotiate his performances across a range of audiences and expectations. Such an understanding expands one’s grasp of his performative ability and the capacity of the genre, rather than reducing him to a talented demonstrator; it also opens up those performances for more complex readings, which is welcome and appropriate: in front of students and academics, whether South African or American, Manisi took no prisoners. A last significant area for studies of oral literature and performance for me, and one that will be immeasurably enabled by the digitisation of material through the Arc to the Future project, is a serious engagement with some of the major figures as intellectuals in their own right, who in many cases considered themselves as such. Many of these thinkers were working at the interface between orality and literacy, and this becomes a point at which orality can engage usefully with scholarship on the history of the book – for example, Andrew van der Vlies (2007) or Isabel Hofmeyr (2004, 2013). The publication in English translation of works

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by Manisi, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, S.E.K. Mqhayi, William Wellington Gqoba, John Solilo, B.W. Vilakazi, M.J. Mngadi, B.M. Khaketla, S.M. Mofokeng, O.K. Matsepe and others offers extremely rich possibilities in this regard. I want to conclude on a personal note, but hope that it points to broader, more significant issues. A few years ago I was due for rerating by the National Research Foundation (NRF) and my application was successful, but it came back with comments to this end: firstly, ‘the candidate should be wary of conducting research in too many different areas’; secondly, the ‘field of orality and performance studies had not perhaps proved to be the major new field of study which it had promised to be’. Many of us have issues with the NRF rating system, so I was not overly troubled by these comments, but they do suggest some worrying assumptions. The first comment seems to assume the science model of research, in which if you research sea sponges, that is what you do in perpetuity. That does not translate to the humanities and especially not to literary and cultural studies. I see moving from one area of study to another related one as broadening one’s thinking; and where new areas of study are opened up or existing ones rethought, redefined or deepened, as broadening the collective field of, in my case, literary and cultural studies. The second comment is perhaps even more troubling. Others might have felt differently, but I never conducted research on oral literature and performance with the aim of establishing or further establishing it as a separate field of study. I was very explicit about locating my work within the context of literary studies (though librarians have consistently frustrated my attempts by cataloguing my work in anthropology). My rationale was that if we were to write literary histories that reflected what had actually happened in this country, or many others like it, or to understand the range of what had been produced historically and in the present, we needed more sophisticated ways of engaging with orality and performance. My hope was that such work would become more routinely part of what we do as literary scholars, not something fetishised or ‘other’.

Finding My Way 147  CHAPTER  SEVEN

‘That Man Patton’ The Personal History of a Book

The books, stories and poems we read or hear end up living in us, telling us. My mother always loved flowers, and when she died in Gaborone in 1990, I saw the massed flowers in the cathedral and dumb, stunned by grief, could think only, ‘Behold Mama, flowers’, the title of Mongane Wally Serote’s fourth volume of poems. Years later, my father died after a long struggle with cancer. Walking round the coastal village that was his final home, and looking through the rooms and bookshelves of the family cottage in which we had shared so many memorable holidays, I had only the nineteenth-century /Xam narrator Dia!kwain’s words to register what felt broken within and around me: The string was that which broke for me Therefore, The place does not feel to me, As the place used to feel to me, On account of it. For, The place feels as if it stood open before me. Therefore, The place does not feel pleasant to me. On account of it (Bleek and Lloyd 1911: 237).1 My father, Hugh Brown, was an English teacher by training. For most of our lives he was also headmaster at various schools: a headmaster 1. Dia!kwain said that the song was composed by a sorcerer named !nuin|kuiten, while ‘walking about in the form of a lion’, having killed an ox (Bleek and Lloyd 1911: 237).

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in the old mould who knew the name of every pupil in the school, was accompanied everywhere by his beloved dog and smoked a pipe. Our home was always filled with books, which we were encouraged to read, and literature was constantly around us and in my father’s speech. When he observed me haul my sorry self out of bed as a teenager, usually after a late night, he would comment, ‘What rough beast is this that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ His attempts to rouse me in the morning were sometimes accompanied by ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking’. And his frustration at my being late when he occasionally had to pick me up from school (I still have no idea why I was frequently late in leaving, as I loathed the place) usually led to a soliloquy of his own: ‘It’s like the opening of a Shakespearean play,’ he would extemporise. ‘The courtiers, the jester, the servants, the nobles – all have already assembled on the stage. Finally, we reach “Enter two gentlemen from Verona”, and out come the last two, Brown and Kemsley.’ Yeats, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Coleridge all loomed fairly large in our upbringing. There is even an, apparently apocryphal, story that my father wanted to name me William Shakespeare Brown, as my birth coincided with the fourth centenary of the Bard’s birth, but I doubt that. He was generally a humane man and could not have afflicted that on anyone. Quoting literature was never an act of erudition or display. My father despised intellectual snobbery. Literature was simply part of everyday life and speech, there to be used because it was good and helpful. Beyond the Romantic poets and Shakespeare, my dad loved G.K. Chesterton, Robert Browning, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis and a whole range of others, from biographers to modern novelists. He had met Guy Butler, who was to become professor of English and a prolific poet and author, while studying at Rhodes and was a fan (though I seem to recall he regarded the multiple-volume autobiography as a little excessive), and he was taken by Roy Campbell (less so by William Plomer), Herman Charles Bosman, Olive Schreiner and more recently, at my prompting, Douglas Livingstone. But the novel that informed his life, that of my mother, and hence partly the rest of us, was Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (first published in 1948). The novel resonated with my parents in multiple

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ways. My mother, Jean, grew up on a farm just outside Richmond, in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, and had a deep affinity with and compassion for the landscape and people of the area, which I think she recognised in Paton’s novel. When my father’s job took us away from her beloved Midlands to the dry wastes and mine dumps of Welkom, she literally sat under a thorn tree on the banks of the muddy Allemanskraal Dam and wept. Both of my parents could recite by heart the opening lines of the novel, and on frequent holidays to visit relatives in the Midlands they would usually stop the car at the head of the famous valley and one of them would recite the famous passage: There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea; and beyond and behind the river, great hill after great hill; and beyond and behind them, the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand (Paton 1984: 7). For my mother, what was then known as ‘Natal’ was the Midlands, and she had an invisible but uncrossable line in her mind just south of Pietermaritzburg where ‘Natal’ ended. She was always goaded by an advertisement for an insecticide that appeared frequently on SABC television in the late 1970s, which began, ‘In Natal, we have cockroaches this big!’ ‘Maybe in Durban,’ she would respond, ‘but not in Natal.’ I’m not sure she ever forgave my siblings or me for living in Durban for so many years . . . My parents were both Christians of the liberal school (Anglicans), very much like Paton; my father also having some of the issues with authority and discipline that plagued Paton’s career. My parents refused to sing the national anthem of apartheid South Africa, ‘Die Stem’, on the

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grounds that it was blasphemous in assuming that we could make deals with God, as the Boers had done on the eve of the Battle of Blood River (Ncome). It was made clear to us as children that discrimination on the basis of race was wrong. My parents did make distinctions in terms of class and education, not at the level of individual treatment of others, but in their understanding of broader politics. They exhibited a kind, concerned attitude to those with whom they interacted on all levels, but – beyond consistently voting against the National Party in all elections – did not see the need to transfer that commitment to political action. Their liberalism was what I would later learn at university to identify as paternalistic. Their political attitudes were probably epitomised by their involvement in an organisation called Kupugani, which sold cheap but extremely nutritious foods to black people (fortified soups, and so on) in a bid to combat malnutrition. In truth, I think both were wary of humans as collectives, and were moved instead to compassion and care by the sufferings of those they knew closely. Paton’s evocation of the anguish of the two fathers; Reverend Kumalo’s acknowledgement of moments of his own pride or ill will; Jarvis’s action of grace towards the end of the novel; what my parents would read as the humble eloquence of speech of the Kumalo couple: these are the things they would have valued, responded to, been moved by in Paton’s novel. My parents (like Paton?) would not have taken to what they perceived to be the demagoguery of the union organiser. I had read and loved Cry, the Beloved Country while at school and remember being moved by the emotional pathos that impels the narrative. I was relatively familiar with the rural landscape and people of Paton’s account (my experience was two decades later than the publication of the novel, but not much had appeared to change in what was then rural Natal). When I next encountered Paton’s famous novel, I was a far more politicised university student, fairly active in anti-apartheid organisations such as the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS), the End Conscription Campaign (ECC) and the United Democratic Front (UDF). I had not read it again, as it had seemed to have ‘paled’ among the voices of the new black poetry and the numerous politically assertive novels that had been published. In 1986, I reread it for an Honours seminar, in which Michael Chapman, professor of English at

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the University of Natal,2 introduced us to, among other things, Stephen Watson’s (in)famous critique of Cry, the Beloved Country, for offering ‘mystificatory’ solutions to ‘political/sociological’ issues (1982), and J.M. Coetzee’s ‘simple language, simple people’ argument in which he accused Paton of diminishing his black characters through the ‘simplicity’ of their utterances (1988). In a brief Marxist phase, which he soon recanted, Watson set out to undermine what he saw as the contradictions of Paton’s argument in the novel. He argued: The problem that [the novel] poses and presents is that of the detribalisation of blacks by whites and the lawlessness and moral corruption which this enforced social disintegration has caused. The novel quite accurately explains a certain historical phenomenon which is now a commonplace in the analysis which one finds in South African criminology textbooks (Watson 1982: 34). Having identified the problems, however, Watson argued that Paton then provided a response that was incommensurate with them, leaving the novel an ideological failure: A certain ideology, which is an amalgam of liberalism and Christianity, is brought to bear upon this problem. And it is through this that the internal dissonance of the novel becomes most apparent; it is through this, too, that the major mystification of Cry, the Beloved Country is perpetrated. Through the mouthpieces of Stephen Kumalo and Msimangu, Paton attempts to solve what is clearly and statedly a material, sociological problem by means of metaphysics; against the multiple problems caused by detribalization and urbanization he advances the solution of love (Watson 1982: 35).

2. After a merger with the University of Durban-Westville, now renamed the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

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It was a response to the novel that, even though I had been exposed to Marxist literary theory at the time, seemed to me inadequate. It seemed to apply a ready-made theoretical solution to a novel, and then castigate it for not fitting the model. I wondered at the time why Watson was bothering with Paton’s novel when clearly he already had his solution and could see little of value in Paton. But I still felt I had my own problems with the novel. Coetzee’s critique struck me as a little more trenchant. The colonial tendency – usually arising from ignorance of indigenous languages – to render black people as laboured speakers of English, and by potential implication laboured thinkers, is well known. Coetzee’s argument is that the speech of Kumalo and others in the novel falls into this trap: ‘The artificial literalism of passages like the above [in which a Zulu mineworker explains the mining process to Stephen Kumalo (Paton 1984: 17)], however conveys in addition a certain naiveté, even childishness, which reflects on the quality of mind of its speaker and of Zulu speakers in general’ (Coetzee 1988: 127–8). Even then, though, I suspected that it was perhaps a more complex point than Coetzee allowed. In most cases, Paton is registering in English conversations that we assume would have taken place in isiZulu, and the techniques for signalling such linguistic transfers are open to multiple interpretations and evaluations. In addition, many of these speakers would have been mission educated and, certainly in the cases of the Kumalos and Msimangu, thoroughly acquainted with the Bible. One could argue, contra Coetzee, as others have done, that Paton was seeking to register a dignified and biblically inflected isiZulu in the English conversation of his major characters, which, for example, contrasts with the more brashly rhetorical (even corrupt) speech-making of the brother John Kumalo in the township halls of Johannesburg. Here is an example of the contrast: The voice growls again, something is coming. ‘Not only here,’ he says, ‘but in all Africa, in all the great continent where we Africans live.’ The people growl also. The one meaning of this is safe, but the other meaning is dangerous. And John Kumalo speaks the one meaning, and means the other meaning.

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‘Therefore let us sell our labour for what it is worth,’ he says. ‘And if an industry cannot buy our labour, let that industry die. But let us not sell our labour cheap to keep any industry alive.’ John Kumalo sits down, and the people applaud him, a great wave of shouting and clapping. They are simple people, and they do not know that this is one of the country’s greatest orators, with one thing lacking. They have heard only the great bull voice, they have been lifted up, and let fall again, but by a man who can lift up again after he has let fall. ‘Now you have heard him,’ says Msimangu. Stephen Kumalo nodded his head. ‘I have never heard its like,’ he said. ‘Even I – his brother – he played with me as though I was a child.’ ‘Power,’ said Msimangu. ‘Why God should give such power is not for us to understand. If this man were a preacher, why, the whole world would follow him.’ ‘I have never heard its like,’ said Kumalo. ‘Perhaps we should thank God he is corrupt,’ said Msimangu solemnly. ‘For if he were not corrupt, he would plunge this country into bloodshed. He is corrupted by his possessions, and he fears their loss, and the loss of power he already has’ (Paton 1984: 160–1). In the mid-1980s I could register both sides of the argument, but still could not bring myself to mount a defence of Paton. As young, fairly radical students, we gave Paton short shrift in the seminar, much to Chapman’s frustration. The pressures of the states of emergency simply did not leave us, apparently, with the room to take the longer contextual view, or to allow the novel its imaginative resonance, rather than simply reducing it to the status of failed political argument or social project. I suspect that its slow rhythms, extended locutions and celebrations of rural life seemed so far removed from the political realities of the mid-1980s – the civil war being fought daily in the streets of the townships with petrol bombs and burning tyres – that we did not find ourselves moved towards sympathy for Paton’s novel. Part of me left that seminar buoyed by our own apparent radicalism (a bubble to be

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thoroughly burst in the brutal violence of the late 1980s and early 1990s), but also sorry for a very frustrated Chapman (this preceded his ‘liberated zone’ argument, in which he subsequently argued that under the political pressures of South Africa under several states of emergency, the ‘authority of experience’ might take precedence over its ‘aesthetic transformation’ (1988a)). In truth, I think I was also a little disappointed in myself. Cry, the Beloved Country had had a major impact on me when I had read it at school, and Paton’s rendering of Zulu speech had not then struck me as patronising, but as powerful. I was also aware of my own potential intellectual duplicity. In the previous week’s seminar, Chapman had presented us with Robert Green’s political critique of Nadine Gordimer’s A World of Strangers (Green 1979). Chapman had put me on the spot, asking me what I thought of Green’s argument. Somewhat desperately, I blurted out that Green’s argument was inappropriate, in that Gordimer had written a novel, not a sociological treatise. This answer seemed to satisfy Chapman, and my apparently lucky guess got me thinking about how we respond to literature and the ways in which it frequently seems to exceed our readings. If I could allow this for Gordimer, why not Paton? Thinking back to those days, I assume that our antagonism to Paton was in large measure an emotive one; a concern that Paton’s veneration of a black rural pastor over an urban, modern politics, which could only be presented in caricature, seemed disturbingly to echo the retribalising policies of the apartheid state. It was a crude misreading, which assumed fallaciously that Paton’s narrative was some kind of national allegory, in which the return to the rural village provided moral (and political) closure. It was in its way perhaps analogous to the many misreadings of Disgrace as national allegory, in which Lucy’s acceptance of her rape by Petrus is seen as the price whites must pay for apartheid. My older brother had taken a different career path from mine (merchant seaman rather than academic) and his objections to Paton were probably more mixed up with his own slightly fractious relationship with my parents, as well as a puckish sense of teasing them for apparently being wedded to a time long past; but we colluded in always getting a rise out of them, especially my father, by referring disparagingly to ‘that man Patton’. We were, of course, aware of the correct spelling and

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pronunciation of Paton’s name. My spelling of his name here with two Ts reflects our deliberate mispronunciation. I only ever met Paton once, at an event at the University of Natal, and he was by that stage very frail. He had been an authoritative voice that I had heard from various platforms throughout my life, and I felt sorrow and compassion that this great figure was reduced to this, rambling somewhat incoherently about the bird feeder in his garden. Reading Chapman’s book Green in Black-and-White Times (2016), I was intrigued and gratified to discover the lively, often irascible, exchanges by letter and phone between Douglas Livingstone and Paton. After so many years, the authoritative liberal voice still rings clearly in the pages of Chapman’s book. Here is one of Livingstone’s recollections: [Alan Paton] once asked me if I agreed ‘The Tyger’ was the best poem ever written. ‘Only if you’ve had a comfortable life’ (overturning several tables). ‘Are you serious?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘You talk the most utter rubbish. What if you’ve had an uncomfortable life?’ ‘ “Innisfree”.’ (There went several more tables.). ‘You mean Yeats.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What rubbish.’ But he came back soon enough on the phone to crow: ‘Nine bean rows. You can’t feed a family on nine bean rows.’ ‘Hang on there, William! I mean Alan. The man is alone in the poem, and there’s honey as well. Besides each bean row could be a mile long. Feed a bloody regiment.’ He expressed grave reservations about Irish metaphysicians’ and microbiologists’ tastes in poetry but, in time, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ entered the repertoire (Chapman 2016: 188). Paton’s reputation suffered some damage following accusations of violence, especially corporal punishment or caning, in his treatment of

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juvenile offenders placed in his care while head of Diepkloof reformatory from 1934 to 1948.3 I do not wish to comment on the veracity or otherwise of those allegations. Rather, I wish to point to the potential for harsh moral judgement within the novel and within Christian liberalism itself – it is a presence that haunts Cry, the Beloved Country for me. When the Reverend Kumalo finds his sister Gertude in Johannesburg, and plans to return her to the rural village that was her home, he places on her severe moral strictures as to how she is to live and behave. At one stage she is chastised for laughing too loudly, something that suggests puritanism rather than liberal Christianity. Her running away again near the end of the novel seems to be precipitated by her being unable to continue living with such strictures. There is a real danger, within Christian liberalism, of the male (father) figure taking upon himself the right to discipline and punish in God’s name, even frequently with violence, ostensibly for the good of whomever is being punished. I suspect there may have been something of that in the Diepkloof accounts. There certainly was, I assume, a self-righteous Christian rage in my father (a vocal admirer of Paton) when he inflicted on my older brother corporal punishment with a cane for allowing his pet hamster to starve to death. It was an act that almost destroyed his relationship with my brother, and was never repeated. Does the figure with the cane stalk the margins of Cry, the Beloved Country, as it may also my personal history with the novel? Returning to the novel in 2020, I find myself asking different questions of it. I am struck by Paton’s courage in putting his own political views (I assume those articulated by Arthur Jarvis closely mirror Paton’s) to the most strenuous test (though I acknowledge that as author he is both referee and player in this). As Job is in the biblical narrative an ‘innocent’ whose faith is tested by severe and unwarranted trials, so the views of Arthur, son of the farmer James Jarvis, and his ilk face the most arduous test in the novel when he is killed senselessly by three young black men, 3. See, for example, Chisholm (1991), who argues that despite Paton’s attempts to create a morally humane system of rehabilitation at Diepkloof, the institution still centred on the Main Block in which the majority of the offenders were incarcerated in prison-like conditions, and which administered corporal punishment, despite Paton’s public denouncement of this practice. She notes that in 1937 alone, 2 000 strokes were administered to inmates (1991: 29, note 23).

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among them Stephen Kumalo’s son, in a home invasion unrelated to his work. Can the liberal Christian vision, rooted in tenets of grace and forgiveness, survive even this, Paton seems to ask? While in the mid-1980s I asked why Paton could only depict labour and political movements in terms of demagoguery or lack of moral courage, which seemed at odds with what we know was happening historically in the late 1940s of the novel’s setting, I find myself now – perhaps increasingly wary of big politics – somewhat more sympathetic to his vision. Corruption, power squabbles and factionalism have seriously undermined the credibility of many labour organisations and political parties; and the legitimacy of the state still remains in question after it turned its guns – apartheid style – on striking mineworkers at Marikana platinum mine on 16 August 2012, killing 34 miners and seriously injuring 78, and its hands to the pillaging of state coffers in the orgy of state capture only now being investigated by a commission of inquiry and documented in Jacques Pauw’s investigative account, The President’s Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and Out of Prison (2017). I am also struck by the fact that my parents’ recitation of the famous opening lines of the novel ended too soon, on the lingering pastoral note. They could perhaps have continued to this point: The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof. It is well-tended, and not too many cattle feed upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil. Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed (Paton 1984: 7). But for me the opening passage gains its real force in Paton’s undermining of the pastoral by human despoliation – soil erosion and overgrazing – as a result of too many people being confined to too small an area: Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. But the rich green hills break down. They fall to the valley

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below, and falling, change their nature. For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs. Too many cattle feed upon the grass, and too many fires have burned it. Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet. It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men. The titihoya does not cry here any more. The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth. Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them any more (Paton 1984: 7–8). It is a call to environmental awareness and to the social and biological tragedies that follow migrant labour and white appropriation of land, which speaks in powerfully prophetic ways to current conditions, from 70 years ago. Perhaps, above all, though, I come to Cry, the Beloved Country not so much with big issues and questions, but simply as a novel. I am struck by the ordinary drama that it unfolds, even as that ordinary drama also becomes fabular in its telling. I take the time to enjoy the rhythms of Paton’s prose. I find myself bumping into characters who unsettle my previous readings and whom I assume I had rushed over in pursuit of what struck me as the grander narrative. I find the ambiguities and contradictions – perhaps intentional, perhaps not – which allow me to winkle out new, different meanings. It is a profoundly worthwhile encounter. Rather than, say, Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, perhaps Cry, the Beloved Country may come to be regarded as the South African novel, at least in terms of what has been published to date; indeed, in many ways it may be metonymic of the very category of ‘South African literature’ itself. Far beyond trivialising references to its ‘Jim comes to Jo’burg’ plot, its narrative is the archetype of our national story, of human

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suffering under colonial and apartheid forces; and it anticipates, even if it does not answer, or answer convincingly for some, just about every thematic question that has been posed in the field since, some possibly by omission. Dan Jacobson’s comment that Cry, the Beloved Country is a ‘proverbial’ South African text may be apposite here (quoted in Van der Vlies 2006: 25). It is a narrative that lived in my family as much as the stories of our ‘real’ predecessors did. Its always unfinished narrative may have reached temporary closure in the reconciliation of Jarvis and Kumalo, and the final full stop of the novel, but it opens again and again whether at the public levels of labour disputes or the intimacies of unshackling one human heart.4 Good books, or poems or plays, songs or performances nag at you; they will not let go. I can easily point out the ideological problems of Yeats’s poem ‘Easter 1916’, but I cannot let go of it as a poem, even though I disagree with some of it. It is easy to show how Shakespeare dodges the crucial question he raises in Julius Caesar of ‘fitness to rule’ (actually he does it in most of the plays dealing with regicide), but I still find myself returning to it constantly and taking something different from it each time I do. It is another of those texts that writes me. My understanding of Cry, the Beloved Country has changed over the years, and with age I am more tolerant than I was as a postgraduate student in the 1980s. But now, as then, I find I cannot deny the novel. It seems to insist on my engagement with it. It seems I have no choice but to keep rethinking my relationship with ‘that man Patton’.

4. The phrase is Douglas Livingstone’s. He said he would wish to be remembered as a poet only had he managed to write one or two poems that could ‘quietly unshackle one human heart’ (Chapman 2016: xiii).

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Recursive Futures?

Or: What Rough Beast?

Besides Michael Chapman and Margaret Lenta’s edited volume SA Lit: Beyond 2000, discussed previously, five new(ish) studies have tried to make sense of the current state of South African literature: Monica Popescu’s South African Literature beyond the Cold War (2010); Shane Graham’s South African Literature after the Truth Commission (first published in 2009); Leon de Kock’s Losing the Plot: Crime, Reality and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing (2016); Andrew van der Vlies’s Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (2017); and Hedley Twidle’s Experiments with Truth: Narrative Non-Fiction and the Coming of Democracy in South Africa (2019). Of these five, Popescu’s, while a worthwhile and enlightening project in itself, is of least interest to me here, as it seeks to trace intellectual and literary continuities and affinities between South Africa and the former Eastern bloc. Graham, De Kock, Van der Vlies and Twidle are more directly focused on the current state of South African literature or writing itself. They all agree that South Africa is currently a society in crisis, having failed to deliver what was promised in the Mandela years, characterised by rapacious capital, crime and corruption, both within the state and civil society, and sustaining a culture of violence almost unmatched globally. Who can deny this? Their diagnoses of the causes and literary manifestations of the crises differ slightly, and there is a guarded optimism to De Kock’s and Twidle’s arguments, less evident in Graham’s and Van der Vlies’s (the latter explicitly introducing the notion of postapartheid ‘disappointment’). But all four offer useful pointers in this complex, multivalent field, and I want to consider their arguments before offering my own views.

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Postapartheid cultures, postapartheid identities Graham argues that South African literature (and more broadly culture) in the aftermath of apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) ‘exhibits a collective sense of loss, mourning, and elegy, as well as a sense of disorientation amid rapid changes in the physical and social landscape’. Citizens feel at sea, threatened, brutalised and vulnerable, and so are engaged in ‘new forms of literal and figurative “mapping” of space, place, and memory’ (2011: 1–2). Many scholars and analysts have pointed to the fact that the economic crisis in South Africa has been largely precipitated by the accession, initially under Nelson Mandela, and then directly through Thabo Mbeki’s Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) initiative, to neoliberal global capitalism – what Graham Pechey refers to as ‘the neocolonial outcome of an anticolonial struggle’ (1994: 153). Graham points out in this regard that the political and economic isolation of South Africa in the late apartheid years ironically shielded it from ‘the global flows of late capitalism’, but that it has now been subsumed into a global economic, technological and epistemological order for which it, and its citizenry, were radically unprepared: The newly intensified postmodern phenomena of technological change, hyper-mobility, planned obsolescence, consumerism, commodification, and time-space compression all act to thwart the inscription of memory onto urban spaces and exert a general amnesiac effect. Jameson describes it as a ‘crisis of historicity’: he identifies a key feature of the postmodern as ‘a new depthlessness [and . . .] a consequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality’ (Graham 2011: 6). In a context in which old ways of knowing no longer apply, and faced with bewildering change, the willed historical amnesia of late capitalism, increasingly regimented and corporatised spaces, and an economy functioning on a scale beyond the comprehension of most, ‘ordinary South Africans struggle to achieve autonomy and the capacity to determine their own spaces; in the process, they develop new modes (both aesthetic

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and lived) of mapping social space and registering narratives of the past in shared social memory’ (Graham 2011: 2–3). To complicate matters, Graham argues, the staging and witnessing of highly personal and painful narratives at the TRC hearings across the country served to undermine categories and distinctions of identity that were fundamental to people’s sense of who they were: The TRC broke down the fundamental divides between public and private spaces and narratives, and between the scales of the familial, the local, the national, and the international: that is, stories that were previously considered private and personal were told in a public forum, registered in collective consciousness, and mediated for a global audience (Graham 2011: 3). Not surprisingly, then, he finds in the post-TRC literary texts he analyses that authors are ‘struggl[ing] to develop new cognitive maps of the post-apartheid, postmodern city, where the amnesiac impulses of globalisation are most in evidence’ (Graham 2011: 4). The literature is characterised by narrative forms such as confession and second-person direct address; representational strategies utilising displacement and condensation; recurring tropes involving mapping, archiving, and curating; the symbolic conflation of bodies and landscapes; excavation and holes; and palimpsests. Considered as a whole, these techniques, strategies, and motifs teach us about the multilayered complexity and ephemerality of memory, about the intangible importance of spatial relations, and about the ways in which generating and sustaining social memory is tied up with questions of time, space, place, and public memorialisation (Graham 2011: 5). Graham’s reading of the postapartheid is echoed by Achille Mbembe in his description of Johannesburg in the same period: In the wake of the collapse of apartheid [. . .], the collage of various fragments of the former city are opening up a space for

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experiences of displacement, substitution, and condensation, none of which is purely and simply a repetition of a repressed past, but rather a manifestation of traumatic amnesia and, in some cases, nostalgia or even mourning (2004: 374). Mbembe does, however, footnote this description with the qualifier, ‘This is not a peculiarly South African condition.’ Graham’s account is not particularly hope-filled. He refers to the ways in which ‘what Gillian Hart has called the “disabling” rhetoric of globalisation has partly transformed the spatial divisions of apartheid into structures ideally suited for the demands of capital’ (2011: 7). What hope he does find is in literature’s capacity to recall, assemble, disassemble or reassemble older memories, other modes of being, other socialities, which suggest other possibilities. He quotes Hart again in this regard: Hart explicitly and usefully links the necessity of challenging the disabling, ‘there is no alternative’ rhetoric of globalization to the necessity of challenging the amnesiac impulses of the postTruth Commission era: ‘our efforts to remake the future depend crucially on how we remember – and forget – the past, and . . . it has taken a huge dose of official amnesia to render the neoliberal project palatable. By reconstructing dimensions of local histories and translocal connections, we were disrupting elements of this amnesia’ (Graham 2011: 8). Graham sees ‘the project of a whole body of post-apartheid literature’ as being to ‘register [. . .] memories of the past so as not to remain trapped in that past but to use it to build new identities in the post-apartheid future’ (2011: 8). Whether the body of postapartheid literature is sufficiently coherent and ‘engaged’ to sustain that claim is open to debate. But Graham appears to think so, claiming that if there is a common consensus among post-apartheid writers about why narratives of the past must be kept alive in collective memory, it is because these narratives contain forgotten modes of social existence that might enable the birth of true radical

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democracy – which demands autonomy and self-determination on the part of all South African people (Graham 2011: 20–1). That is a very substantial burden to place on the often unwilling shoulders of literature. I want to move now to Van der Vlies’s study, before considering De Kock’s and Twidle’s. Present Imperfect is the most densely theoretical of the recent studies. Van der Vlies says at the outset that the book is ‘a study of affect, temporality and form in writing from postapartheid South Africa’ (2017: vii), and he identifies ‘disappointment’ as a ‘significant structure of feeling in contemporary South Africa’ (viii). Through the dual valences of ‘disappointment’ as both word and concept – as a ‘frustration of expectation’ and a sense of a ‘missed appointment’ – Van der Vlies explores the failures and frustrations of the postapartheid: Disappointment serves [. . .] to focus and direct my engagement with a range of negative feelings that are also experiences of temporal disjuncture, including stasis, impasse, boredom, disaffection, and nostalgia. I use disappointment as a category description, emphasising variously its suggestions of affective or temporal dislocation as the works in question, and their cultural contexts, demand. As such, what the chapters that follow offer is a cohesive approach rather than a single argument (2017: viii). Van der Vlies pursues his argument through engagements with the work of J.M. Coetzee, Ivan Vladislavić, Ingrid Winterbach, Marlene van Niekerk, the late Nadine Gordimer, Songeziwe Mahlangu and Masande Ntshanga. He also finds in the dislocation and despondency of these postapartheid novels significant echoes of the global, transnational malaise. Van der Vlies’s interest is particularly, though not exclusively, in the possibilities of queer theory or queer studies for the work he is undertaking, and he engages with the ‘queer characters’ (his term) in the novels with special interest. The book is clearly the result of extensive research (the endnotes and bibliography comprise 63 pages, fully a quarter of the entire book) and is undoubtedly a worthwhile project in itself, but I find Van der Vlies’s study of less interest to my current project

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than De Kock’s Losing the Plot, which is to me both more wide-ranging and accessible. ‘Losing the plot’ As the subtitle of his book – ‘Crime, Reality and Fiction in Postapartheid Writing’ – suggests, De Kock does not seek to follow what he refers to as the ‘coverage’ model of David Attwell and Derek Attridge (2012), or Gareth Cornwell, Dirk Klopper and Craig MacKenzie (2011). Rather, his study ‘proposes a way of examining the distinctive features of literature after apartheid [. . .] it delineates certain through-lines that characterise post-apartheid writing. Although these lines are, in my view, prominent and important, they remain a partial set of concerns’ (2016: 1). He argues that this approach allows ‘the making of bold conceptual propositions without resorting to the fixity, and the closure, of allconsuming metanarratives. It means that in advancing a theory about the corpus of work under scrutiny, or more accurately within that body of work as a whole, one’s conceptual model is acknowledged as partial’ (1–2). Like Graham, De Kock is concerned with the spatial and psychic dislocations of the postapartheid, ‘in which the signs by which we read the social have, in Jean and John Comaroff’s description, become occulted, i.e. obscured by contending regimes of information and legitimation’ (De Kock 2016: 4). His major line of argument, though there are many others in this multilayered analysis, is that in this context in which the plot of the transition from apartheid has been ‘lost’, readers and authors are drawn to modes of writing that seek out evidence, find, analyse and explain, as ‘such wayward, hard-to-read social conditions require exacting and forensic examination, which is what crime writing [and creative nonfiction] sets out to do, holding up to the light South Africa’s reconstituted public sphere and finding it riddled with symptoms of criminal pathology’ (4). He reiterates the point later in his book: In particular, citizens in unstable postcolonial polities where law and disorder feed off each other tend to demand information concerning the ‘contact zone’, and they will eagerly consume both factually presented and imaginatively reworked data – from

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the lurid headlines of the Daily Sun to the fact-based fictions of crime writers. In short, the market for proxy detection is a big one – or at least big enough to meet the writer’s urge to go ‘out there’ and find out what the hell is ‘really’ going on (2016: 70). I have to admit that, as a reader, I come away from a creative non-fiction text like Jonny Steinberg’s The Number (2004), or a novel by Margie Orford, Deon Meyer or Mike Nicol, with a sense that I have a better grasp than before on what is ‘actually happening’ in my city and country, that the curtains have been significantly opened, even as I know, from around three decades of teaching and researching literature, just how slippery and contested notions of truth are, and what fictional techniques are at play in all of those works. I mentioned in the introduction to this book the international as well as local ‘reality hunger’, the causes of which are multiple and complex. Following Graham, De Kock sees the TRC and its ‘emphasis on witnessing and (re)discovery, and [. . . its] perceived need to excavate and confront previously concealed or repressed forms of truth’ as significant in the South African turn to ‘truth’ genres in recent years, especially as they ‘continue the TRC ethos of investigating perversities by folding these into a past-present conjunction’ (2016: 8). De Kock argues: Current South African writing is characterised by the rise of both genre fiction and creative nonfiction as ways of responding to a widely-perceived sickness in the body politic, where the plot, metaphorically speaking, is thought to have been lost, and there is a premium on uncovering actual conditions. The real issue, for writers, is to find the right story, or to get the story right (2016: 9). Focusing his study, not as in his previous work on ‘the seam’, but now on the ‘transition’, De Kock invokes Meg Samuelson’s sense of the transition as always about to happen, never to finish, hesitating on its own doorstep, a ‘thinking about being-at-home that is at the same time inherently liminal [. . .] entering the house that locates one on a perpetual threshold’ (2016: 11). In this sense, he argues, the promises of the end of apartheid,

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and the notion of new beginnings articulated in the Albie Sachs debate, have not materialised, and ‘despite the efflorescence of postapartheid writing, its apparent release from the straitjacket of political themes, it is also true that much of the new writing consists of narratives and counternarratives that set up a dialectic around the very notion of a fresh start’ (11). Even as he admits to some of the failings of both the postapartheid transition and its literature, De Kock is, nevertheless, cautiously optimistic, sometimes even excited by what he reads in the postapartheid era. Key to this is what he describes as the ‘reclamation of narrative’, on which he is worth quoting in full: If the ‘forward march’ version of transition has been conclusively derailed, leaving indeterminacy and plot loss in its place, then one of the unambiguous success stories emerging from the transition is the restorative value of story itself, or, more broadly speaking, narrative. In postapartheid writing, a great diversity of form and content emerges, constituting a body of work that is itself significantly transformed, despite its subject matter often being about the failures of transformation. This is a key point. For, regardless of the perceived loss of plot on political and social terms, the space of the postapartheid is one in which a great many voices have found their pitch in public discourse, in more conventional as well as new media forms. Such speaking out, self-validation and identity reclamation, not to mention public position-taking (or posturing), is surely one of the most notable achievements of postapartheid writing, and of the ‘silent revolution’ in general (De Kock 2016: 15–16). I think De Kock is entirely correct in this, and the efflorescence of writing in this country in the last almost three decades is testimony to a reclaimed sense of the power and significance of narrative. It is a point he notes that Njabulo S. Ndebele made almost twenty years earlier in the essay ‘Memory, Metaphor and the Triumph of Narrative’, in which he argued that ‘a “major spin-off” resulting from the “stories of the TRC” is the “restoration of narrative”. [Ndebele] sees this event as a rare opportunity

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to take narrative beyond testimony, towards imaginatively creating what he calls “new thoughts and new worlds” ’ (De Kock 2016: 28). In the postapartheid context, the moral certainties of the anti-apartheid struggle have given way to uncertainty, contradiction, vacillation and an overwhelming uncertainty about ‘right’ behaviour, especially as systems of law and policing consistently fail ordinary citizens. De Kock points out in this regard that postapartheid fiction dramatises a reconfigured contest over law and order in which the borderlines of legitimate and illegitimate are frequently under erasure. So pervasive is crime that neither the state nor any civil grouping has a monopoly over violence or legitimacy. The terrain is one of moral ambiguity, where newly validated cultural ‘difference’ becomes complicit in a gory inversion of the rule of law (2016: 42). He also shows significant continuities between postapartheid literature and what preceded it, in terms of issues and thematics: especially ‘the frontier’ and ‘the journey of discovery’ are ‘compulsively reiterated’ in the work of authors like Jonny Steinberg, Kevin Bloom and Antjie Krog. De Kock points to a ‘strong rather than weak or vestigial continuity with the past’, an ‘ateleological (re)cycling’, rather than a ‘rupture with the past’ (2016: 58). This compulsive or obsessive return to the past suggests for De Kock a hesitancy about arguments that claim a post- quality to writing in the decades following the unbannings and the formation of a democratic parliament: If inductively based reports such as those offered by Bloom, Krog and Steinberg are at all credible, then postapartheid’s material conditions contradict the promise of any such forward-looking temporalities: they call into question the scripts of (even faltering) progress in the here and now. Instead, and again, we have the spectre of never (quite) having begun the journey to another, better place (2016: 85).

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In a way that echoes David Shields’s ‘argument’ in Reality Hunger, discussed in my introduction, De Kock does, however, argue for epistemological, cognitive and aesthetic shifts, reflected in and occasioned by new media, which emphasise ‘visual salience, speed, brevity, and the predominance of surface over depth’. But he presses this further in suggesting that consequently ‘actuality, often in seemingly raw and semiprocessed form, rides high in this environment, whereas older forms of “deep” literature, and expectations of close reading, fare less well’ (2016: 133). It is an argument that approaches the controversial notion of ‘surface reading’, as suggested, for example, by Sarah Nuttall (2011), echoing the ideas of Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus: Haven’t we come towards the end of a way of reading that has evolved into a big sophisticated machine since the 70s but may no longer be right for its time? Don’t we feel a little tired now of critique as we have come to know it, of the work of detection involved in identifying the Marxian or psychoanalytic symptom (quoted in De Kock 2016: 183)? As an argument for how people engage with digital media, I accept an emphasis on flash, brevity, surface and impact, but understanding those media in any sustained way would require ‘deep’ thinking about how and why they create ‘reality effects’. Arguments against ‘deep reading’ often seem to be insufficiently cognisant that the term is a metaphor. In a real sense, in reading, we generally only have ‘surface’. This is especially the case with printed words, to which the term is most commonly applied: we usually have only black marks on a white page. The ‘depth’ of reading is in considering the multiple ways in which those marks on the page signify. A ‘surface’ reading of text would probably mean flippant, unconsidered, slapdash. I pointed out in the introduction that as long as we try to think reasonably systematically about things, we will always have ‘theory’; analogously, as long as we think carefully (or slowly) about meanings, however they may be generated, we will always have ‘deep’ reading. In fact De Kock’s own fine-grained readings of Bloom, Steinberg and Krog actually contradict his own argument about ‘deep literature’ and ‘close reading’ having been superseded. His analysis reveals those texts to hold

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deep meanings, which reward close reading. Where I think he is correct, though, is in the larger shifts in genre (and potentially readership and reading), which much of the new writing is effecting: It seems feasible to propose that ‘literary culture’ in a broad sense is undergoing a slow but steady transformation: from a relatively elitist, mainly highbrow concern with (meta)-fictional excellence in deep forms that require ‘unpacking’, to imbrication within a mediated public sphere in which affect and surface, the raw and the real, loop recursively in open, public forms of witnessing and writing (De Kock 2016: 142). But, to reiterate, understanding forms that play off ‘surface’ or ‘reality effect’ does not imply ‘flip’ thinking or reading, any more than writing about comedy requires one to do so in comedic mode. ‘Experiments with truth’ Twidle’s Experiments with Truth is the most recent book to have appeared in the field of South African literature. Like Graham, De Kock (and Samuelson), Twidle notes that, on the evidence of the texts in his study, the postapartheid is unfinished, uneven, always-in-process, publicly encompassing, intimately infiltrating: The death of apartheid was not a punctual event, but an ongoing, uneven social process: one that is happening in different ways and at different tempos, split in innumerable ways across institutions and individuals, ranging from the most public languages to the finest tissues of subjective awareness, and one that will reach across generations (2019: 96). As the subtitle of Twidle’s book – ‘Narrative Non-Fiction and the Coming of Democracy in South Africa’ – suggests, it is not a study of postapartheid literature generally, but a deep exploration of one of its defining features: the rapid growth in non-fiction as a literary genre. With Claire Scott’s At the Fault Line: Writing White in South African Literary Journalism (2018), it is one of the few (only?) book-length studies to

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engage seriously with this exciting and exponentially expanding body of writing. Twidle does trace the long history of non-fiction as a genre in South Africa and elsewhere, but notes that in the period on which he focuses, the two decades and more since the first democratic elections in 1994, non-fiction has gained traction in a way that should demand attention: During this period of social and political transition, some of the most ambitious and compelling writing published within and about the country has emerged in non-fictive modes. The work of writers like Panashe Chigumadzi, Jacob Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Antjie Krog, Sisonke Msimang, Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg, Ivan Vladislavić and many others forms a body of cultural production that is ambitious, textured, imaginative and self-aware; that is sometimes experimental, often risky and troubling, often divisive – and worthy of more critical attention than it has received (Twidle 2019: 1). His study refuses the binary of the literary and the non-literary, and deftly interweaves multiple critical and thematic threads (fictionality, truth telling, story, facticity, evidence, documentary, imagery, found objects, reportage, witness, and so on) to produce readings that are perceptive, illuminating, innovative, but also open-ended. In the introduction, I quoted approvingly his ideas about academic writing and especially literary criticism. He describes his mode of reading in Experiments with Truth in ways that resonate with me: This account of non-fiction in South Africa hopes to remember and prolong the moment of encounter: the moment of not (yet) knowing, of embarking on ‘a reading and writing journey that has not ended’ (Ndebele, Fine Lines 20). It wants to preserve a sense of onset, even naiveté in the presence of other existences and the ‘strange guests’ that arrive from the past. As such, I try to think and theorise from within the forms, surfaces and textures of the works in question, rather than subscribe too quickly to the

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knowingness of much academic prose. My case studies read for form, not because of any narrow formalism, but because it is here where one might see how innovative literary texts evolve their techniques for social thinking (Twidle 2019: xii). The non-fictional texts under discussion in Experiments with Truth for the most part create their meanings within the amplitudes and constrictions of the first-person pronoun ‘I’. Twidle argues that a deep theme in his book is to understand how specific literary encounters and cultural texts are woven into the trajectory of individual lives; and how certain forms of reflective non-fiction [. . .] are able to rehearse the intimate and sometimes arbitrary ‘backstory’ of how one comes to know what one knows, and think what one thinks. These are written modes where the mediation of the personal voice is not effaced or denied but put to work, where the ‘I’ becomes a risky but vital intellectual tool (2019: ix). Accordingly, Twidle’s critical narrative stages its own ‘mediation of the personal voice’ in framing its responses to the texts, including its frustrations, wrong turns and dead ends. Experiments with Truth is a remarkable book and, like many of the other studies that I have referred to, including De Kock’s, deserves far more attention than I can give it here. I find it compelling and instructive, not only for the readings it produces of the specific texts Twidle examines, but also for its rich suggestions of how we might do criticism differently. Finding my way De Kock suggests moving from the term ‘South African literature’ to ‘South African writing’ (2016: 134). It is an important, but also paradoxical, possibly contradictory, shift. Positively, it expands the range of what he can analyse and discuss, while neatly sidestepping the rather stale and pointless arguments about whether, for example, crime fiction in South Africa is ‘good enough’ (read serious, sufficiently aesthetically complex, and so on) to be called ‘literature’. In so doing, he (perhaps

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inadvertently) also calls the double bluff that has long characterised literary studies: as critics we frequently want to use the term ‘literature’ in both inclusive and exclusive ways, as both metonymic of all (creative) writing and as a judgement of value within the field of (creative) writing generally. Let me illustrate with an anecdote. Some years ago I heard a paper on ‘South African autobiography’, given by a scholar who has done a great deal of work in the area. I had just returned from a research fellowship in the United Kingdom, and had been struck by the preponderance in bookshops of autobiographies (mostly ghostwritten, I assume) of major sports people, chefs, actors, and so on; and I asked the rather unfair question as to whether the presenter’s definition of autobiography implicitly included the qualifiers ‘serious’ and ‘literary’, which clearly it did. It seemed that the scholar in question wanted both the right to be understood to be presenting on ‘autobiography in South Africa’, not ‘some literary autobiographies from South Africa’, and the right to decide what was sufficiently serious and literary to warrant the term ‘autobiography’ and hence scholarly attention. I say the question was ‘unfair’ because the scholar was working according to conventions long operative within literary studies – someone writing on ‘contemporary South African fiction’ would likely to be assumed by most to be analysing the works of J.M. Coetzee and Ivan Vladislavić, not Wilbur Smith. Negatively, De Kock’s shift from ‘South African literature’ to ‘South African writing’ potentially opens the field impossibly widely. I think the terms are usefully held in mutually modifying dialectic. Steinberg says that in South Africa ‘writing continues to be a business of “coordination between deaf people” ’ (quoted in De Kock 2016: 20). In this context, De Kock refers to the significance in postapartheid writing of ‘reclamations of identity, the excavation of buried or repressed selves, [. . .] unfolding self-expression’ (17–18). Negatively, the writing’s compulsive engaging with the past as wound or trauma testifies, I think, to the pervasive damage of apartheid and colonial histories on all aspects of life, and how futile and premature efforts to patch together a nonracial future were. How hopelessly optimistic we all were . . . But present engagements with the past may also paradoxically instantiate a past we never had, which we were denied, and which, where

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it existed at all, operated in the margins, the back rooms, the darkened houses, the jail cells – a ‘postapartheid past’ in which social knowledge should have been shared, intellectual affinities explored, and which is now open to us only as an act of will and volition. It involves translating, retranslating and reading all of the many (forgotten?) African-language writers and poets; scouring the archives; opening ourselves to the languages and stylings of the street; expanding our repertoires of listening and receiving; opening ourselves to affront and offence; pushing beyond the limits of the study walls; not mistaking habits of thought for either knowledge or judgements of value. It is a project of unmaking and remaking, and we do not know, cannot know, where we are going; only that staying ‘here’ – in the failures of a society that has betrayed its own citizenry, and in which those failures are now reracialised and hurled back at any institutions large enough to be targets – is not a viable option. We need, ironically, to decolonise ourselves, all of us – not just whites, or white males, or university curricula. We are the colonial subjects of intersectional oppressions: neoliberal capital; crime; corruption; antiintellectualism; the corporatisation of everything (education, medicine, sport, social care); deliberate elisions of history; and so on, and so on. Unfashionable as it may be to some humanities academics, what we need is a recovery of agency, in a far more all-embracing sense than the term has been used before. We need to re-author ourselves. It is a battle to be fought on many fronts, not only in oppositional ways, but also in creative, constitutive ways. Literature has a role to play, in reimagining, in refusing elision, in finding connections, in creating narratives within or of disorder, in finding the unusual angle or image, in refracting, condensing, blurring, exposing the seemingly anodyne, though deeply rapacious, world orders of extraction and consumption thrust on the rest of the world by global capital. And it has, in its capacity to imagine, project, empathise, the most powerful ability to rehumanise. South African literature, postapartheid, is a place of radical newness and obsessive return. The dream of a radical break with the perceived strictures of the past is at once achieved and deferred, as the possibilities of writing, genre and audience expand dramatically, but the questions and concerns of the past prove stubbornly unresolved, or persistently present. It is characterised by a sense of loss and betrayal, but also a

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sense that loss and betrayal may be giddyingly liberating, a release from a scripted future. Its return to questions of the past suggests the usefulness of retaining a notion of ‘South African literature’, in understanding the long history of those questions and concerns, their framing in different epochs and by different authors, and their most recent articulations. Its revelling in newness, expanded possibilities and global reach attest to the invigoration of a field that threatened to become claustrophobic and asphyxiating: an opening into the paradoxical multiplicity of what may be called ‘a literature’.

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Index

Abbott, H. Porter (The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative) 131 academic writing and publishing 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 10–14, 15, 16–17 African Methodist Episcopal Church 75, 79–81, 82 African National Congress 75, 76, 86 Arc to the Future project 133, 145 Ashcroft, Bill (The Post-Colonial Studies Reader) 93 Ashforth, Adam 90, 98, 100 Madumo 91, 97–103, 114 research relationship with Madumo 99, 104–5, 106 sociological analysis 101, 107 use of first-person narration 100, 107–8 Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa 90, 103–8 Attridge, Derek (The Cambridge History of South African Literature) 19, 25–6, 37–40, 141–2 Attwell, David The Cambridge History of South African Literature 19, 25–6, 37–40, 141–2 Rewriting Modernity 42

autobiographical writing 112, 113, 174 Bakhtin, Mikhail 112 Barber, Karin ‘African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism’ 139–40 ‘I Could Speak until Tomorrow’ 136 Discourse and Its Disguises 135, 137 Beukes, Lauren (The Shining Girls) 61, 62 Bible (in African Christianity) 77–9, 81, 82, 83 Biesele, Megan (Women Like Meat) 136 Bloom, Kevin 169 book production, studies on 30 Brockmeier, Jens (‘Narrative Integrity’) 113, 130 Brown, Duncan Are Trout South African? 9 Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa 136 To Speak of This Land 29 Voicing the Text: South African Oral Poetry and Performance 136 Wilder Lives 9 195

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see also Cry , the Beloved Country (Paton) Brown, Stuart (The Pressures of the Text) 136 Buthelezi, Mbongiseni 143–4 ‘Kof ’ Abantu, Kosal’ Izibongo?’ 144 ‘Sifuna Umlando Wethu’ 144 Carruthers, Jo (Spiritual Identities) 95–6 Chapman, Michael 54, 150–4 Green in Black-and-White Times 9, 53, 155 ‘The Liberated Zone’ 27–8 ‘ “Oral” in Literary History’ 142 ‘Postcolonial Studies’ 96 SA Lit 19, 29, 40–2, 43, 44, 53, 59, 60–1, 66–7, 161 Southern African Literatures 26–7, 28, 29–30, 39, 50, 53 Chatwin, Bruce (Songlines) 99, 115–16 Chikwava, Brian (Harare North) 70 Chisholm, Linda (‘Education, Punishment and the Contradictions of Penal Reform’) 156n.3 Christianity, African indigenised 79 African Methodist Episcopal 79–81 Methodist 79 Wesleyan 79 see also under Mgqwetho, Nontsizi Church of the Nazarites 143

Cizama (clan name) see Mgqwetho, Nontsizi Coetzee, J.M. 4, 110, 112, 131 Disgrace 45, 98, 114, 126, 131, 154 Foe 131 White Writing 151, 152 Coovadia, Imraan 42 Transformations 9 Comaroff, Jean 134, 166 Comaroff, John 134, 166 Coplan, David B. 134 In the Time of Cannibals 137 Cornwell, Gareth (The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945) 19, 30–6, 39, 57 creative non-fiction 9, 14, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115–16, 167 Antjie Krog on 109, 113–19, 120–3, 124 devices used 111–12, 114 exponents of 9, 109, 131 and rethinking whiteness 120, 121 see also first-person narration Cry, the Beloved Country (Paton) critiques of 151–3 position in South African literature 158–9 prophetic quality of 157 see also Paton, Alan Dawkins, Richard (The God Delusion) 93–4 De Kock, Leon

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‘Does South African Literature Still Exist?’ 20, 47, 59–60, 61–2, 63 ‘The End of “South African” Literary History?’ 62–3, 64 ‘A History of Restlessness’ 21–2 Losing the Plot 2, 19, 161, 166–71, 173–4 De Moraes Farias, P.F. (Discourse and Its Disguises) 135, 137 Dlamini, Jacob Categories of Persons 9 Native Nostalgia 109 Dube, Musa W. 77–8 Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible 77 ‘Readings of Semoya’ 78 ‘Savior of the World but Not of This World’ 77, 78 Eagleton, Terry 8, 16, 30, 48, 49, 91, 93, 94, 119 After Theory 5, 58, 93–4 Reason, Faith, and Revolution 94 Erlmann, Veit 134 ethnography 104–6, 118 fiction and autobiography 112, 114 as a genre 113–14 and non-fiction 115, 125, 126, 127, 131 South African 66, 67, 110, 113, 123–4, 166, 167, 169 see also South African literature

Finnegan, Ruth Oral Poetry 134 ‘What is Oral Literature Anyway?’ 135 first-person narration 100, 107–8, 112, 114, 173 Freeman, Mark (‘Narrative Integrity’) 113, 130 Fugard, Athol (Die Laaste Karretjiegraf        ) 68 Furniss, Graham (Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature) 137 Gerwel, Jakes 22 Gikandi, Simon (‘Looking Back on Literature’) 47–8, 49, 50, 63 Gordimer, Nadine 36 A World of Strangers 154 Graham, Shane (South African Literature after the Truth Commission) 19, 161, 162–5 Gray, Stephen (Southern African Literature) 25, 26, 32, 44 Green, Robert (‘Nadine Gordimer’s A World of Strangers’) 154 Griffiths, Gareth (The Post-Colonial Studies Reader) 93 Gunner, Liz Musho! Zulu Popular Praises 136 Politics and Performance 136 Power, Marginality and African Oral Literature 137 ‘Ukubonga Nezibongo’ 134 Gwala, Mafika (Musho! Zulu Popular Praises) 136

198  Duncan Brown 

Heywood, Christopher (A History of South African Literature) 30 Hofmeyr, Isabel 30, 140 We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told 15, 136 humanities scholarship, state of 2–3, 22 Ibandla Nazaretha (Church of the Nazarites) 143 izibongo see praise poetry izinyanga see traditional healers James, Deborah 134 (Songs of the Women Migrants) 137 Jones, Megan (Categories of Persons) 9 journalism 8–9, 14, 110, 111, 126, 171 vs literary non-fiction 111 see also New Journalism Kaschula, Russell H. The Bones of the Ancestors Are Shaking 137 Foundations in Southern African Oral Literature 136 Klopper, Dirk (The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945) 19, 30–6, 39, 57 Kraybill, Ron 121 Krog, Antjie 71, 169 Begging to be Black 120, 123, 124, 127–9, 131 A Change of Tongue 124

Country of My Skull 111, 113–14, 120, 121–3, 127 on creative non-fiction 109, 113–19, 120–3, 124 There Was This Goat 69, 116, 120 Kwok, Pui-lan (Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology) 77 Lalu, Premesh (The Deaths of Hintsa) 23, 56 Lanoye, Tom 131 Lenta, Margaret 40 SA Lit 19, 40–2, 43, 161 Levey, David ‘Religion, Literature and Identity in South Africa’ 96 ‘Tracing the Terrain’ 96 literary non-fiction see creative nonfiction literary studies 19, 22, 24, 30–1 as a discipline 48, 50, 51, 52–3, 56–7 and modes of reading 54, 56–7, 58 theoretical frameworks 4–5, 9, 53–4, 57, 58, 95–6, 166 see also South African literature literary value 33, 49, 50 literature alternative ways of engaging with 3–4, 6, 7–9, 10, 11–15, 16, 17–18, 175–6 canon of 54–5, 65 and institutions 47–8 see also creative non-fiction

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Livingstone, Douglas 155, 159n.4 Lord, Albert 134–5, 137–8 McGregor, Liz At Risk 9 Load Shedding 9 MacKenzie, Craig (The Columbia Guide to South African Literature in English since 1945) 19, 30–6, 39, 57 Mantel, Hilary 73, 89, 108 Martin, Julia Imagination and the Eco-Social Crisis 9–14 A Millimetre of Dust 9, 69 Writing Home 9 Maxeke, Charlotte 75, 79 Maxeke, Marshall 75, 79 Mbeki, Thabo 76–7 Mbembe, Achille 104 ‘Aesthetics of Superfluity’ 163–4 Mgqwetho, Nontsizi African Methodist Episcopal influence 75, 79–80 biblical re-authoring 81–6 biography and description of her work 73–6 manyano preaching style 83 and Methodism 79, 81 Moravian education 75 postcolonial biblical reading of 77–8 prophetic style 84–5, 86 secular reading of 76–7 Mhlongo, Niq (Dog Eat Dog) 69–70

Moele, Kgebetli (The Book of the Dead    ) 67 Mpe, Phaswane (Welcome to Our Hillbrow) 65 Mpolweni, Nosisi (There Was This Goat) 69 Muller, Carol Ann (Rituals of Fertility and the Sacrifice of Desire) 137 Murray, Sally-Ann (‘Mediating Contemporary Cultures’) 9 narrative integrity 113, 124, 127–31 ‘restoration of ’ (in postapartheid literature) 168–9 Nathan, Manfred (South African Literature) 24 National Research Foundation 146 Ndebele, Njabulo S. 35, 109, 131 The Cry of Winnie Mandela 45–6 Fine Lines from the Box 9, 172 ‘Memory, Metaphor and the Triumph of Narrative’ 168–9 Rediscovery of the Ordinary 67 Neser, Ashlee, 143 Stranger at Home 144–5 New Journalism 98, 111, 112, 114, 126, 131 Nixon, Rob 9 ‘Literature for Real’ 15 ‘Non-Fiction Booms, North and South’ 15 non-fiction 113, 115 non-fiction writing 14, 15, 109–10, 125–6, 166, 171–3, see also fiction; creative non-fiction

200  Duncan Brown 

Ntsikana (Xhosa prophet) 83–5 Nuttall, Sarah 9, 23, 30, 44, 109, 170 At Risk 9 Beautiful Ugly 9 Load Shedding 9 Opland, Jeff 74, 75, 76, 83, 86, 138, 145 The Dassie and the Hunter 145 Xhosa Oral Poetry 134 Xhosa Poets and Poetry 75, 137 oral literature studies 138 anthropological/historical approach 134, 138 expanded approaches in 1990s 135–8, 143–6 literary-formalist approach 134–5, 137–8 pioneering 133–4 South (and southern) Africa 133–4, 136–8, 143–6 oral and performance studies digitisation 145 national model postapartheid 141–2 postcolonial studies model 138–41 recent 142, 143–5, 146 theoretical approaches 143–6 Parry, Milman 134–5, 137–8 Paton, Alan 155 political beliefs 156, 157 see also Cry, the Beloved Country (Paton) Peires, Jeff (The Dead Will Arise) 159

Popescu, Monica (South African Literature beyond the Cold War) 19, 161 postapartheid identities 162–3, 166, 174 postapartheid literature commentary on 161–2, 163–9, 171–6 continuity or engagement with the past 169, 171, 174–6 and economic crisis 162 and memory 163–5 and ‘restoration of narrative’ 168–9 postapartheid terminology 23–4 postcolonial governance and modernity 91 praise poetry 73, 85, 143, 145 Raban, Jonathan (Driving Home) 11 Ratele, Kopano (There Was This Goat) 69 religion and spirituality academic writing about 89, 90, 91, 92–7, 106–8, 116–20 dichotomies in thinking about 93, 94, 95 literary techniques 94–5, 98, 100, 102 and literature 16, 97–8 rethinking of in postcolonial modernities 89, 92–3, 95, 96–7, 108, 116–17 see also writing belief Rossouw, Johann (Verwoerdburg) 67–8

Finding My Way 201 

Sanders, Todd (‘Power Revealed and Concealed in the New World Order’) 92 Scarry, Elaine (Dreaming by the Book) 111–12, 129 Scheub, Harold (The Tongue Is Fire) 137, 138 Scott, Claire (At the Fault Line) 9, 171 Shields, David (Reality Hunger) 6, 7–8, 13, 15, 170 Sithole, Nkosinathi 59n.3, 119–20, 143 Hunger Eats a Man 67 Slemon, Stephen (‘The Scramble for Post-Colonialism’) 138 South African literature commonality and difference in concept of 25–6, 28, 29–30, 32, 39–40, 44, 45–6, 59–62, 109 crime writing in 2, 66, 166–7 Cry, the Beloved Country in 158–9 dispersal of focus in study of 21–2, 55 expansion of ways of writing on 6–7, 9, 14–15, 46, 62–4 historical reviews of 30, 31, 32, 33–6 language groupings and languages in 24–5, 26, 30, 31, 32, 37–8, 39, 67–8, 71, 143–4 the literary and 28, 29, 30, 31–3, 34, 38, 44, 46, 49–50, 53 literary value in 50, 65

local and transnational response to 41–2, 43, 45, 62 as a national literature 40, 41, 63 significance as a category 42–3 social justice and 289 vs South African writing 173–4 translated works in 26, 67, 70–1 see also postapartheid literature southern Africa 26, 70 Soweto 90–1, 101 spiritual insecurity 90, 101, 103–4, 106 Steinberg, Jonny 69, 109, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174 Steyn, Johan (Father Michael’s Lottery) 65 Tate, Andrew (with Jo Carruthers Spiritual Identities) 95–6 Tiffin, Helen (The Post-Colonial Studies Reader) 93 traditional healers 102–3, see also witchcraft Trump, Martin (Rendering Things Visible) 51–2 Truth and Reconciliation Commission testimonies 109–10, 114, 167, 169 Twidle, Hedley 9 Experiments with Truth 19, 161, 171–3 Firepool 4, 15–17 ‘In a Country Where You Couldn’t Make This Shit up’ 14–15 ubuntu, writing about 120–1

202  Duncan Brown 

Vail, Leroy (Power and the Praise Poem) 136 Vandermerwe, Meg This Place I Call Home 68 The Woman of the Stone Sea 69 Zebra Crossing 68 Van der Vlies, Andrew 30, 41, 42, 133, 145 Present Imperfect 161, 165–6 Van Onselen, Charles The Seed is Mine 15 The Small Matter of a Horse 15 Van Wyk Smith, Malvern Grounds of Contest 39 ‘White Writing/Writing Black’ 28, 32 Vladislavić, Ivan (Portrait with Keys) 109

Watson, Stephen (‘Cry, the Beloved Country and the Failure of the Liberal Vision’) 151–2 Wessels Michael 143 (Bushman Letters: Interpreting /Xam Narratives) 144 West, Gerald 77, 82, 95n.2 ‘Thabo Mbeki’s Bible’ 77 West, Harry G. 90 Kupilikula 95, 104, 105, 117–19 ‘Power Revealed and Concealed in the New World Order’ 92 White, Landeg (Power and the Praise Poem) 136 Wicomb, Zoë (October) 70 witchcraft 90, 91, 97, 98, 101, 103 Wolfe, Tom 98, 112, 113, 126 writing belief 116–20

Wallace, Dale (‘The Modern Pagan Witch’) 90

Yali-Manisi, David 145