Cape Town Book Fair discussion

Why do I hesitate to speak about the topic “South African writing”?

Finuala Dowling*

This discussion took place between Finuala Dowling and Rosemund Handler on Sunday 19 June 2006 from 16h00 to 17h00, at the Cape Town Book Fair, held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. The topic was writing in South Africa.

Partly it’s the problematic idea of a national literature. The category “South African writing” begs us to find that such a category exists in the first place. But we encounter difficulties immediately. Many South African writers, whether through choice or exigency, live or have lived abroad for substantial periods – JM Coetzee, Justin Cartwright, Lisa Fugard. Top South African writing talents are poached by overseas universities – Athol Fugard, Zakes Mda, Zoe Wicomb. What qualifies you to be a South African writer? A childhood spent here? That your landscape is South African? What then of Patricia Schonstein-Pinnock’s The Apothecary’s daughter or Michiel Heyns’s The Typewriter’s tale? We cannot cast out such well-written stories.

A tremendous burden is placed on the national literature in South Africa, one similar to that levied in other major sites of national and nationalistic conflict, producing (for example) Irish writing or Jewish writing. The burden comes in the form of a demand which goes something like this: “We South Africans are not quite sure who we are. We have a parliament, we have educational institutions and the media, but they have not described our identity. We therefore turn to writers – novelists in particular – to tell our story to us in riveting, imaginative, visionary prose.” I do not think there is an author in South Africa who is not aware of this question, this burden. You can try to ignore the burden, write your own story, your own vision, but you will be reviewed and judged against the rubric.

Despite the stricture, writers have responded in multiple ways, with a polyphony of voices. There are the novels that return to a family past – The Children’s Day (Heyns); Shirley, Goodness & Mercy (Van Wyk); Intricacy (Cope); The Native Commissioner (Johnson). There are novels of haunting hybrid urban landscapes – Welcome to my Hillbrow (Mpe) and The Exploded View (Vladislavic); novels where a much more distant past is rendered, showing consequences for now – Garden of the Plagues (Brownlee); Praying Mantis (Brink). Then there are novels that are almost the opposite of the Bildungsroman, charting the nosedive from dysfunctional family life – Gardening at Night (Awerbuck); Acid Alex (Al Lovejoy). There are powerful novels of an unsettling and interim present – The Good Doctor (Galgut) and Disgrace (Coetzee).

Where is our Ulysses, where is the novel that will encapsulate the essence of our South African identity? Should we even want this beast to come slouching towards us? I suspect that when it comes it might be in Afrikaans, because when a writer writes in Afrikaans (see Van Niekerk’s Agaat) she is not in the first instance thinking about how the rest of the world will read her. It is our national secret code, a language we all to some extent understand, the language we use when we want a succulent idiom, a word like egte, eina, wragtig, aaklig. My point here is partly humorous, partly serious. When we conceive of a South African literature we are not talking about how we ourselves see our own writing, but how overseas readers might best sum us up. When we try to categorise ourselves, then we are in the business of producing what one of my very bright Stellenbosch students referred to as “ South Africa: the boxed set”.

Recently a journalist referred to novels by white South African women as a category in its own right. She did this in order to conclude that we had nothing to say. It was a white woman writing, and perhaps she had internalised misogyny and the postcolonial dictum. The problem here is that categories work only in limited ways. We can talk about African writing or gay fiction if our aim is to spotlight a neglected, marginalised authorship, or to probe some general trends and shared interests. But very soon the categories collapse, like poor quality plastic bags into which too much has been stuffed. Are all South African white women writers really bad? Who says “bad”? If we all write novels of development (which we don’t) it still only makes us world writers who have chosen one of the 7 or 11 major archetypes available for writing. Gender and race are blunt instruments when it comes to determining value. We might need a blind tasting – randomly selected pages from authors – and ask our judges: Can you tell which passage is by a man and which by a woman? Which is by a South African and which not? Which is black writing and which is white writing? Which is good and which is bad? As with all blind tastings, I suspect Tassies will rise to the top.

LitNet: 5 July 2006

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