Homebru 2006 author: Dan Wylie

Dan Wylie is the author of Myth of Iron, published by University of KwaZulu Natal Press.

1.  What does it mean to you to have your writing recognised and celebrated as "South African"?

   My feelings are mixed, since I am only semi-/quasi-/pseudo-South African, being from Zimbabwe, displaced though not naturalised into South Africa. I prefer to think of myself as “southern African” – amongst other possible identities (my book is at least partly about the fluidity and multifariousness of anyone’s identity). I live here, and valorise the valorisation of “local belonging” above all else (I don’t mean to be disparaging of or ungrateful for the Homebru campaign’s intentions!), but deem nationalist self-congratulation to be pernicious.

2. What was it that led you to write a book about this aspect of South Africa?

   It began with Julian Cobbing teaching us third-years a dynamic course on the Mfecane back in 1982, at Rhodes; it blossomed eventually into a PhD on white myths of Shaka, which was at least partly a sideways look at the racialistic mythologies I had been raised on in colonial Rhodesia; and that cleared the underbrush for a new, hard look at the history of Shaka himself. I sensed exciting new ground inasmuch as, startlingly and alarmingly, no full-scale historical biography by a professional scholar seemed ever to have been written.

3. Is it possible for one's thinking, and therefore writing, as a South African to be free of political and historical influence?

   As a human being, you mean. Dream on.

4.  Is there a writing community in South Africa, or is writing in this country a solitary journey?

   It is neither; one writes alone, but by reading others one joins a “virtual” community, even if one never makes eyeball-to-eyeball contact. Some of us work in more solitary ways; others network in less solitary ways. No notions of community ought to constrain the flights of individual innovation, exploration, critique – and that’s easy to fall into in our small pond.

5. What different (or similar) roles do fiction and non-fiction play in constructing a South African experience/literature in 2006 and beyond?

   That’s a tough one to give a short answer to: I suppose it depends who reads what; different sections of the population will be differentially affected. There is a gathering ferment of searching and self-searching in most genres, I think.

6. Do you think South African non-fiction has international appeal? If so, can the same be said for unashamedly South African fiction?

   I can’t answer that, apart from the obvious recognition given to our Nobel and Booker Prize winners. Many writers abroad, from Justin Cartwright to Ann Harries, are getting published there, and I suspect many living here are publishing successfully overseas, too. Local flair and flavour, from wherever, has never been an impediment to “international appeal”, so long as the writing itself is powerful and the psychologies of characters true, wise and humane. I suspect the question itself arises from the old “cringe factor” in South African identity; why should we be measuring ourselves against “overseas” in the first place? We lack ambition, chutzpah, range. Where is our Walcott, our Kazantzakis, our Dostoevsky? Almost everything written here is miniaturist, small-scale, bashful. But perhaps, like most places, we still, within that range, produce some work as good as almost anywhere, and a lot of mediocre stuff as well.

7. Who do you think is the most influential South African writer today? And who is your favourite local author?

   For better or worse, I guess JM Coetzee. I don’t have a favourite; I read different people for different reasons. I do believe Sidney Clouts to have been our best ever poet, and I return to him again and again.

8. If you could choose five works (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, performance poetry, etc) from South African literature that would be able to communicate the "South African experience", which five would you choose, and why?

   An impossible question, as there is no one “South African experience”. One can scarcely reconcile, say, Lesego Rampolokeng’s furious rantings with Cartwright’s excellent White Lightning, or van Onselen’s The Seed is Mine with the inwardly directed delicate miniatures of Gabeba Baderoon’s poems. Why should one even try? Some works which might convey prominent aspects of South African experience, like Jonny Steinberg’s two brilliantly disturbing books Midlands and The Number, one hopes never to have to read again. I’d rather read Don Maclennan’s poems, which have hardly anything to do with a recognisably “South African experience”, but which transcend all littleness and patriotic cant.

9. What makes you a South African?

   I decline to be “made” into anything.

10. What is your favourite South Africanism?

    I love being in possession of a “rommeltrommel”.

Moenie ons Homebru 2006-kompetisie misloop nie! Wen 'n lekker Suid-Afrikaanse boekpakkie! Klik hier om meer uit te vind.

LitNet: 23 May 2006

Click here to read answers of the Homebru 2006 fiction writers
Click here to read the answers of the Homebru 2006 non-fiction writers

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