Jose Saramago and the voiceless: An account in two parts

ONE
In 1998 I was a guest of the Swedish Institute and the Nobel Foundation. The occasion was the Nobel Ceremonies.
    Arriving there in early December with snow covering Scandinavia, I discovered that my luggage had been held over by the airport security in Frankfurt where I changed flights. Flying in from South Africa, Johannesburg to be precise, made the vigilant Germans suspicious, I suppose. With the spread of organized crime and South Africa’s warm relations with countries like Libya, I was either part of an international syndicate or a sinister courier of the ‘dark forces’ pitted against what the poet N.P van Wyk Louw called the ‘luminous’ West. Because they were, given this line of reasoning, fully justified in holding back my luggage for methodical inspection, I, naturally, was not perturbed. If in Europe, accept what the Europeans do, even if one can’t make peace with it, I chuckled.
    So, dressed in shirt-sleeves and shivering, I waited in the frugal Arrivals Hall of Arlanda airport for my hosts. A young, well-spoken Swede, groomed for diplomacy and dressed in a snug winter coat, accompanied by a friendly but silent chauffer, just as snug in his winter attire, accompanied me to the Central Hotel in Stockholm. They were both concerned about my luggage and reassured me that the hotel would have coats if I needed one before my baggage was located and returned to me.
    On the way, we spoke about the snow in Stockholm and the sunshine in Johannesburg. The car was heated. I, addicted to motion, forgot about my baggage and sank into the polite conversation. From time to time, I glanced at the spectacular snow-scapes, happy to be out of Johannesburg.
    He told me that for the first time in years, leaders and high-ranking officials of the various political parties had not been provided with complimentary tickets to the Award Ceremony and the Banquet. (He pronounced these with capital letters.) In response to this, the politicians organised their own celebrations in various parts of the city.
    This made me think of the early modernist painters who set up their Salon des Refuses in reaction to rejection by the Salon des Independents, or whatever served as the barometer of excellence in painting in Paris at the turn of the century, I said. I was in Europe, after all, and had to display my knowledge of European culture, even if the two events were a hundred years apart and unrelated.
    Because the alternative celebrations in Stockholm involved politicians, I felt that I had missed the point. It is really like a shadow-cabinet dreaming of the day they would win an election and govern; or better still, it is like a government-in-exile fantasising of the hour when they, or rather their foot-soldiers, will mount an insurrection and seize power. I was happy that I could, with this nonsense, reconcile my thinking with political correctness. This, of course, did not prevent me from feeling thoroughly absurd.
    But then, to my amazement, I realised that these were all really political analogies. The Salon des Refuses, included. The Nobel Prize, with the exception of the Peace Award, focuses on achievements in literature and science. And Peace, in the utopian sense of the word, means the mastery, marginalisation, if not erasure of politics as we know it. I went on rambling in this way to the amusement of my hosts.
    All the idealism of the Nobel Prizes is of course funded by investments from the monies made from the sales of dynamite and arms. No wonder my baggage was held over at Frankfurt International Airport. Perhaps they thought I was involved in money laundering. With my mind back to the fate of my baggage, but without saying a word to my hosts, I silently hoped that the German Politzei did not blow up my bags after they found the ludicrous penguin coat and tails carefully packed in it and mistook it for the disguise of Abu Nidal.
    It seemed as if my hosts could read my thoughts. In the silence that passed between our talk about the weather, my luggage and politics, I gazed at the snow on the side of the road and on the tarmac. The driver is speeding, I thought anxiously, recalling what happens when it rains on the highway between Johannesburg and Pretoria. The young man spoke again. “Yasser Arafat was in Stockholm”, he said.
    ‘So?’ I responded.
    ‘He left yesterday,’ he added.
    ‘Oh,’ I feigned.
    ‘Everyone is relieved!’ he sighed.
    ‘Why?’ I asked.
    ‘The entire city centre was cordoned off. There were police everywhere. The city was taken over. That’s how it felt. In Sweden we are not accustomed to this,’ he explained.
    ‘Security measures,’ I offered smiling inanely, as if I knew anything about such matters.
    ‘It was a real nuisance!’ he exclaimed.
    ‘Why was Arafat in Stockholm?’ I asked.
    ‘The Swedish government offered to act as mediator to break the dead-lock with the Israeli government over the implementation of the peace accord,’ he informed me, and sensing my ignorance, went on explaining the situation in Israel and Palestine.
    ‘Did, it work?’ I asked, recalling an article by Edward Said, I had read a few days before, in which he denounced Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation for what he called their unprincipled compromises and the suppression of internal dissent to placate a right-wing Israeli government.
    ‘Netanyahu, did not pitch up,’ the apprentice diplomat said dryly as the courtesy car arrived at my hotel, bringing an end to our conversation.
    He made sure that I checked in. He introduced me to the Nobel Help Desk. From the minute they picked me up, to the very end of my stay, I later realised, I was in the hands of the most obliging and graceful hosts one can imagine.
    My luggage arrived later that day. I could begin my routine of appointments. Meet up again with old friends and seek out projects dealing with cultural diversity. Walk in the snow.
    I had already, that is before arriving, indicated which of the lectures I would like attend. Economics. Physics. Literature. The Nobel Lecture for Literature, of course, topped my list.
    Walking through the city, I looked everywhere to see if Yasser Arafat, in the scurry between the cordons of security, had not perhaps dropped his obligatory scarf.
    That night I went to see a production of Dutchman, a play by the African-American writer, once known as Leroi Jones and later as Amari Buraka, in which a black man is knifed to death by the white women he flirts with on the New York underground. Presented in the make-shift cellar theatre, run by two visionary young men in the deserted building which once served as the Swedish State Archives, the play highlighted questions of race, culture and tolerance in America and Europe. This was once also a problem in South Africa, I thought to myself, as I walked back to the Central Hotel, its name spelled out in neon rising into the winter skies.

TWO
When I arrived in Stockholm, apart from some articles in the press, I had not read a word written by Jose Saramago, the 1998 Nobel Literature laureate. This reminded me of what a former lover was fond of saying about me: She was given to telling friends and strangers that I was in the habit of reading books only after I had reviewed them.
    Saramago is a member of the Communist Party of Portugal, I knew. I read or heard this somewhere. Where or from whom, I can’t remember. He had been exiled from Lisbon, was declared a heretic by of the Catholic Church who found his novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, blasphemous. This I also knew because it is an old South African story.
    He began writing late in life. In his fifties, I think. That he, with a basic education, a factory worker and mechanic, made himself into a writer, was also something that somehow reached me. I must have heard it in some pub in Luanda from the mouth of a drunken missionary excommunicated by the church.
    These disjointed bits of information were enough to stir in me a feeling of affection for a writer I did not know as reader. Why? Perhaps this was some retentive working class romanticism on my part? It could not be, I reasoned. I had worked with legions of ‘worker writers’ in South Africa and had by now lost my fervour for the proletariat, even thought I am no more than a worker myself. Who, except the corrupt, are not workers?
    Writing this, I recall recently rereading Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto while travelling by a train from Bayreuth in the south-east of Germany along the Rhine to Amsterdam. I reread the text for fun but also to assess it in the light of the demise of communism in Europe. Sitting in a compartment with several strangers, I was bemused by the dogmatic self-confidence in old comrade Karl’s writing. Then I came upon either one or other of his fulminations against the bourgeois or some of the many ludicrous notions. I burst out laughing. The more I tried to suppress my laughter, the more I was gripped by hilarity.
    My travelling companions stared at me as though I was an escapee from a psychiatric ward.
    Yet, I still looked forward to meeting Saramago. This writer who is still a communist in the late-twentieth century. I wanted to hear him speak. I was not playing a game with myself. I was earnest and apprehensive. I was not let down. Listening to him deliver his acceptance speech in Portuguese, I followed his text in an English translation. Below the hissing music of the asparitio which, for me, is Portuguese, I came to sense how in his work, all discourses participate in fiction.
    Here was a writer speaking about his life and work in a language which, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, given as he was to mythology, once associated with those southern languages whose music of honey- sweet mellifluous vowels suggested to him their closeness to the origins of language as opposed to the ‘fallen’ northern languages with their harsh and violent consonants. Listening to him speak in a ‘southern language’ and reading one of those ‘northern languages’, it was impossible to disentangle the autobiographical, the discursive and fictional modes of his text.
    In unpretentious and loosely punctuated but subtle, ironic and compelling prose, he sketched a picture of himself and his writing. It was a reiteration of and a meditation on his own oeuvre.
    ‘The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write,’ he began.
    The hoary romanticism of illiteracy, I thought. He went on to sing the praises of his grandmother beside whom he slept under a ‘big figtree’ watching the stars and listening to stories. The myth of storytelling, I sighed.
    Then he paid homage to what he called: ‘My life-masters, those who taught me the hard work of living, those characters from my novels and plays that right now I see marching past before my eyes, those men and women of paper and ink, those people I believe I was guiding as I the narrator chose according to my whim, obedient to my will as an author, like articulate puppets whose actions could have no more effect on me than the burden and the tension of the strings I moved them with.’
    With this he had moved beyond the chestnuts of literature and the myths of creativity. He was alluding to something else.
    He called up the characters who populate his fiction. ‘The condemned of the earth,’ he called them, echoing Franz Fanon and the Bible, as they marched past the audience. Each and everyone, a stranger to me. The characters, that is.
    Then, without modifying his even and gentle tone, he moved to outline his critique of religion. He spoke about ‘its hideous mask of intolerance’ and the ravages it has left on the history of Europe. He highlighted the absurdity and ‘insane paroxysm of holy wars’ conducted ‘in the name of a same god’.
    These killers, he said, are proof that on Judgement Day, when the warring parties ‘come forward to receive the reward of the punishment they deserve for their sins on earth, God — if His decisions are ruled by anything like human logic — will have accepted them all in Paradise, for the simple reason that they all believe in it.’
    People subscribe to this, he remarked, despite the fact that ‘God cannot, even if he wanted to, declare war on himself.’
    With this, and conscious of his own blindness and hubris as an apprentice writer, Saramago, concluded, referring to himself: ‘The voice that read these pages wishes to be the echo of the conjoined voices of my characters. I don’t have, as it were, more voice than the voices they had.’
    Receiving his medal from the Swedish King, he nodded, tipping his head like a serious jester while everyone else bowed or bent double. When the ceremony ended the King walked toward the laureates and was hastily pulled back and directed to the exit. The hall roared with festive laughter.

At the banquet, presided over by the king, who now descended from a walkway elevated above the guests, the 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights was commemorated. Saramago mentioned that these rights have, for the last 50 years, been honoured more in violation than in respect. Listening to him, I recalled the protestors from the Middle East lining the streets of Stockholm, holding candles in the snow-draped night.
    I have since read Saramago’s work. Like his dog ‘with no name and every name’, in The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks away from Europe and drifts off into the Atlantic, I think about Angola, Palestine, Serbia, Kosovo, the Western Cape, KwaZulu/Natal, Gauteng and all the other places bleeding, each in its own way, even if all bleeding is really the same.
    I howled but not a sound comes from my throat. Then I realised that literature like peace, after all is, figuratively speaking, like dynamite against the silence.

So walking back to my hotel, ankle deep in the snow, I looked back on my tracks. The black marks on the snow, I thought like one hallucinating, was an endless Palestinian scarf.
    ‘Who are you?’ the scarf asked.
    ‘Me?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes, you,’ the spotted cloth replied.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I answered, unable to recognise my own voice.
    The dogstar, wherever it was, barked sharply, like an atom breaking out of matter. I heard it. It was like the sound of cracking snow. That was when I realised it was time to go home and read Saramago, not only because Portuguese is also a Southern African language, but because of the ethics I sensed in his work.

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