Heywood: "Literature as a whole through African eyes"

Erns Grundling

Chris Heywood is the author of A history of South African literature, recently published by Cambridge University Press. LitNet asked him ten questions on how he went about the task of approaching and completing such a mammoth task.

1. Tell us about your background as an ex-South African and literary scholar.

   Thank you for the enquiry. My postgraduate research at Oxford and later at several other universities was in the comparative field of later 19th-century French-English literary relations regarding realism and the novel. It took me some time to recognise that the field should include the impact on the Victorian novel of American, German and South African literary achievements, with Hawthorne, Goethe and Schreiner as key figures in each field respectively. In fact, as I now further recognise, the literary traditions were formed as a quadrille, with considerable exchange in all directions. l hope eventually to convert my scholarly articles in this field, which have appeared in leading journals, into a book surveying the whole field from about 1840 to 1940.

   As a South African I felt at first, when I embarked on literary research, that our country lay beyond the main literary horizon, but through reflecting on the impact of the Sharpeville event on world history, and on taking account of my own shattered response to it, I have been able increasingly to approach literature as a whole through African eyes. The present book is a step in that direction.

   In my reading of writers such as William Plomer and Leipoldt, and through my own experience as an academic teacher in Japan for a decade, I have been able increasingly to use Oriental experience as a guide to modern literature.

2. Why did you decide to write this book?

   It arose slowly at first, as a result of extensive discussions about South African literature in the course of teaching and research at the University of Sheffield, where I founded a postgraduate course in Modern African Literature.

   The immediate stimulus to write came as a result of an invitation from Cambridge University Press to contribute a book, of the length we eventually achieved, to their growing series of publications on Africa. At first glance the task appeared impossible, and many good academic friends said it could not be done. However, I took it all to heart and am delighted to say that the decision to write was not without its rewards.

   In approaching the subject I took care to avoid parcelling the literature into language and community groups. I concentrated, instead, on the ways in which writers from all communities have responded to violent social changes as a result of wars etc over the centuries.

3. What has the reaction or response on the English-speaking South African literary scene been like?

   It's early days yet. We await reviews and considered responses, of which you have published one by Professor Gagiano. Any review can only be based on careful reading of my book as a whole. So far, a few bilingual and multilingual academic friends have responded favourably after reading the book right through and taking account of its materials and arguments.

4. Have you taken note of the criticisms from Afrikaans-speaking scholars such as John Kannemeyer and Ampie Coetzee?

   Yes, I have read Professor Kannemeyer's feature article, and am awaiting copies of others. Happily we have a free press and everyone should have a say. These are, of course, not reviews but personal responses of a type that has abounded in literature and society since the fall of the Roman Empire. Professor Kannemeyer has kindly pointed out some minor errors. These are of the type that is perpetually lamented among my friends who write academic books, as it generally turns out to be impossible to iron them all out at a first attempt. These will, of course, be taken into account if ever a revised edition should become a possibility. In fact, I plan to publish, in due course, the results of research that may shed light on some misconceptions and contradictions in Kannemeyer's feature article.

5. Tell us about your working method in regard to covering such an immense field: How many of the books were actually read, or did you rely heavily on the advice of experts in the respective languages?

   Well, I never write about anything that I have not read a few times myself, with reference guides and criticism in mind. In addition I avoid polemical engagements with critics who appear to me to be misguided or intemperate. Still more, I make a point of not repeating what others have already written. My shelves are crowded with works which, for a variety of reasons, I found myself unable to discuss in the book. Also, the decision was taken to avoid the euphemism southern for South, and to restrict discussion to works arising within the geographically defined borders of South Africa. My original brief was to concentrate mainly on works that are available in English translations. In the case of Afrikaans, however, I ventured beyond that limitation, as I feel that its brilliant literary achievement deserves wider recognition and discovery or rediscovery. Beyond Afrikaans, I have been helped over the years by speakers of and writers on numerous languages of Africa and have drawn on my reading of their works, especially in West Africa. Living in England as I do, I have only sporadic and limited spoken access to the remaining nine official languages of South Africa. Perhaps the future may bring an improvement for me. Fortunately there are fine translations into English, and works written originally in English, by multilingual writers of genius who are or were speakers of Tswana, Sotho, Zulu and Xhosa. As the "Drum" movement and its successors showed, English can be used by anyone to express the literary mind of South Africans of all communities. In a free society, everything is possible.

6. How would you place South African literature within the context of Africa?

   In this context I found numerous interesting landmarks. It was a convention of the 1960s to regard South African writers as remote from colonial and ex-colonial Africa and the rest of the world, or at best prisoners of antiquated literary traditions of literary writing. Certainly the West African writers such as Achebe, Soyinka, and many others made brilliant use of conventions that arose in Europe and are generally termed literary modernism, in conjunction with traditions arising among the ancient civilisations of Africa. It was a pleasant surprise for me, however, to find that South African writers such as Mofolo, Jordan and Plaatje had anticipated the West African writers' thematic interests at many points, thus serving as a point of departure for a post-1957 phase of literature that was widely taken as a literary renaissance.

   Certainly the pioneering landmark of that year was Chinua Achebe's masterpiece Things Fall Apart. But perhaps we should rather speak of a general African literary renaissance with roots in South Africa. That suggestion forms part of the motivation in my book. Beyond that, all South African writers are engaged in the global process of social transformation that resulted from the maritime expansion of Europe. To an extent that is not widely recognised, that process transformed the colonisers as much as the colonised. Taking account of the massive literary achievement of writers and performers such as Campbell, Head, Kabbo, Marais, Schreiner, and many others, I have come to regard South African literature as a central arena in the formation of modern literary awareness worldwide. We are still in the early stages of developing a South African literary mind, along the lines defined by Nat Nakasa and which would be comparable to the American literary mind, or the mind of West Africa. My book is intended as a first exploration of that context.

7. Who are your favourite South African authors of all time?

   Oh, this is a difficult one. I'll assemble a small team of all ages, written alphabetically (seventeen, the total I have arrived at by chance, or no chance, is my favourite prime number). But of course there are many others. For the time being they are: Charles Herman Bosman, Roy Campbell, Rolfes Dhlomo, Ahmed Essop, Athol Fugard, Bessie Head, Uys Krige, Alex La Guma, Etienne Leroux, NP van Wyk Louw, Eugène Marais, Jackie Nagtegaal, Krune Mqhayi, Deena Padayachee, Olive Schreiner, Ivan Valdislavic, and Pieter-Dirk Uys. These are writers whose works I read, experience and talk or write about with pleasure and excitement, rereading and reading further whenever possible.

8. How long did this mammoth task take to complete?

   The invitation from Cambridge University Press came in 1993 and I took the typed script to Cambridge by hand on 8th December 2003. I would estimate that about two years of work were lost as a result of a motoring accident in 1994, so the answer is eight active years, including unconfessed distractions such as completing my edition of Wuthering Heights (on "colonial" principles), and longish teaching hours in Japan.

   But there is an upside to everything. I left Groote Schuur's lovely and wonderful doctors and nurses on the second day of the great election, 28th April 1994. The first few weeks in Groote Schuur were not much fun, but the last two gave me unbounded joy, and courage to complete the task.

9. You define South African society as being a "cohesive creole". What exactly do you mean by that?

   Well, I take creole and creolisation to be more useful terms than the currently fashionable literary term hybrid and its derivatives hybridity and hybridisation. Hybrids like mules and shoats are potent all right, but sadly infertile. A creole society, as the term arose in the days of Portuguese and Spanish colonisation, is a new creation in a new social and geographical setting. As best I can make out from what the authorities have written, the term was coined from Latin creare, meaning "to create or form anew". From the outset, South Africans of all communities have been baked, so to speak, or burned, or created anew by that fiery process, as rocks are metamorphosed by volcanic heat, or as dough is transformed irreversibly into bread. Afrikaans is a powerful living expression of that process, and Afrikaans writers, as well as Afrikaans speakers using English, such as Fugard, Bosman and La Guma, have contributed dynamically to the social and literary transformation. Taking literature as a dreamlike transformation of social experience, I was led to favour this term as a sign for the dynamic interaction between a creative society and its literature. The wrong turnings taken under apartheid, and the inspired reforms leading to its removal, reflect our condition as an integrally creole society, with an urgent need for further development and change.

10. What is your view on the future of the national languages in South Africa, and literature created in these languages?

    There can be no unambiguous answer. Certainly, as in the rest of Africa and the world at large, there is a drift towards English as a main language of literary expression. Also, Afrikaans is threatened and changing, as it has done for three centuries, but its most destructive threat came from within, when it was used as the language of abuse, ignorance, and oppression. Yet it is a beloved language, and the language of love and literary genius, for enormous numbers of South Africans. The changes affect its role in literature, as works by writers such as Dido, Nagtegaal, Small and Uys have shown. No mother tongue can be lost, and literary dynamics will, I think, continue to demand their use.

    The mother-tongue eloquence and sound values of the Nguni and Sotho family of languages, too, are part of the literary heritage, even when speakers of them use English. I remember with particular affection the similar view, which I greeted at first with surprise, of the late Professor Cosmo Pieterse, who is sadly missed. A talk he gave in the early 1960s at Sheffield University opened my eyes to the riches of South African literature, and contributed materially to my eventual writing of the present book.

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