Hey friends. So, as promised to Gio, a little bit of background about my recent trip to the Republic of SA, and some reading I’ve been doing–capsule reactions and suggestions.

My interest in SA first popped up in college. The mid-eighties was the height of divestment agitation on campuses, and my college while far more muted than many was still engaged with discussions about apartheid. I got to know something (something fairly simplistic) about the country; as a person who booked speakers for our campus, I brought in the expatriate journalist Donald Woods, who spoke about Stephen Biko and apartheid. I had the luck of being the guy who picked up speakers at the airport, two hours away–so I spent 2 hours talking with Woods on the way to campus, had dinner with him, saw his talk, then drove him the next day the 2 hours back–and it was astonishing. He was the most generous, open, engaging storyteller, and I learned a lot–and my interest grew. I did a little reading on my own–I think I first read Coetzee’s _Foe_, as well as Woods’ book about Biko.

It all came back when I went back to school in the ‘nineties, where despite my general focus on American culture/fiction, I took a bunch of the “multicultural” or “postcolonial” or what-have-you courses with Teresa McKenna and Dave Eggenschwiler–and in Dave’s classes, particularly, I ended up reading much more SA fiction, particularly getting myself caught up in a full-blown investigation of everything Coetzee had written. Two things stood out in my engagement. First, ye olde debate about the postmodern as or against the political; Coetzee’s writing, with a couple of notable exceptions, was attacked in our class, and he engaged in debates with other SA writers, notably having been scolded by Nadine Gordimer for evading the issues of the time. (She loved his book _Life and Times of Michael K_, but had problems with his other fictions, despite their virtuosity, as apolitical.) My read was that even in the most oblique and experimental of his works, Coetzee was deeply engaged with SA culture and history and politics–and in fact I developed an over-long, unrefined argument that his works were taken collectively a metafictional reexamination of SA literary history. Coetzee also threw out a very strong argument, one that echoes through my reading of SA fiction today, too: when political oppression so vibrantly defines the terms of representation, the only way to escape reproducing such oppression is to find formal mechanisms which disrupt and define themselves, as best possible, outside of that system. JMC was skeptical of the ability of social realism–the dominant formal style of most SA fiction throughout the 20th century, and being trumpeted as absolutely politically necessary in the ’seventies and ‘eighties–to really break down the way racist, nationalist ideologies emerged through the conception of the “real.” So I was very interested in how a “postmodern” literature might attend to the “postcolonial” and particularly to the politics of race and class and gender.

The second big part of my engagement was in terms of nation and narrative, the stuff that really fired me up in my studies of American fiction. How does narrative historiography–how do forms of writing the past–shape and connect to the complexities of social reality, in ways that do the “imagining” of a community, following good old Benny A.

So, blah blah blah: I read a ton of SA lit, through the 20th century, starting with Olive Schreiner and Sol Plaatje, running up through Dhlomo and then the Drum writers. I was very taken with Alex LaGuma and Coetzee, but also found Gordimer pretty compelling.

Post-grad school I’ve taught SA lit as a component of a World literature survey, and the difficulties of tackling “nation”–particularly a nation with a colonial and postcolonial history as complicated as RSA–became a problem that engaged me enough to put together an article (on the difficulties of teaching World lit in a gen-ed survey). And I’ve found, aside from forcing me to really think about my pedagogy, SA lit has been enormously successful as a mechanism for getting my students to think in different ways about race, class, and politics in America. For instance, we close our section on SA by discussing the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (and reading an *astounding* novel by Zoe Wicomb called _David’s Story_, which deals with a coloured former ANC rebel trying to come to terms with his own past–but Wicomb’s engagement is with the imagined “identity” of coloured, with the gender oppression endemic through both Afrikaans and ANC cultures, with the difficulties of historiography — all obliquely commenting on the difficulties of the TRC, and its goals for testimony and witness, to tell a full accounting of the past). We read an essay by Wole Soyinka which debates whether reconciliation or reparations would be better models for postcolonial nation-building…. and I turn the question to the US. Where almost everyone is vehemently with Soyinka about the limits of reconciliation in SA, the class fractures around what narratives make the most sense for American history. Race and class seem so easy when we’re talking about “them” in SA, and I find it a tremendously useful comparative exercise.

So–all that background sets up where I’m at today. I’ve long fantasized doing more work on SA, on going there. I’ve toyed with the idea of trying to set up a student-abroad trip (we have month-long classes, in January and May, for such studies). So I’ve kept my eyes out–had heard about a program through CIEE (an educational international program, aimed both at students and at their educators). And this year my university was able to offer funding for the CIEE seminar (on “Multiculturalism in SA after apartheid”). So I jumped to the opportunity and applied–and got the funding.

Our seminar was one week in Cape Town, then a few days in Pretoria/Johannesburg. Most every morning was comprised of two speakers–some lecturers at University, on topics from history to lit to a sociologist’s take on “race”; some tied to NGO or governmental organizations, including a major organizer in the labour movement with ties to COSATU and an AIDS educator/activist in the local townships. Most afternoons we had tours of major historical sites (various museums, Robben Island) and of communities. The most challenging and significant day, for me, was a tour through many of the informal settlements–shantytowns–outside Cape Town, with a guide whose connection to the communities was both historically/politically-informed and on-the-ground real — Mervyn Wessels, the guide, gave us amazing background and information on the communities, their histories, their current and on-going struggles, but also brought us into conversation with a couple of cooperatives. It was odd–tourism is HUGE in SA, and that includes guided tours through poverty — and we were part of that, no doubt. But Mervyn’s approach disrupted the exotic gaze of the outsider, did a little bit to make it more interactive and collaborative.

Throughout the seminar, I found my interests amplified–the questions that drive my prior engagements with SA lit are vital concerns for the country today. We saw an amazing play–”Bafana Republic”, by Mike van Graan–a one-woman series of sketches, where different characters (a white tour guide, a Brazilian soccer coach’s assistant, an Afrikaans former “security” force member, various contestants on “African Idol”) evoke the most brutal, scathing commentaries on current debates and issues. Viciously funny, and unlike most anything I’ve ever read in the fiction–satire of that parodic, comedic nature just seemed absent. And in q&a with the playwright he mostly agreed, aside from one lone figure in theater (Pieter-Dirk Uys, an Afrikaans comedian who did vicious satires of Afrikaaner politics, generally to Afrikaaner audiences, through apartheid).

And that gets me to kind of where I’m at now: through the apartheid years, as evidenced in the debates around Coetzee, there was a dominant mode of representation, with dominant concerns, in SA fiction.  With the end of apartheid and the birth of a democratic republic and a vibrant reimagination of racial identities and a vicious history to make sense of/move beyond .  .  . what do writers write about?   I haven’t any one answer, and I’m still sorting this all out–I’d like to get an essay together on some of my reading.  But here are some of the works I’ve circled around before, during, and since my SA trip:

–Zoe Wicomb — anything.  Her short story collection _You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town_ is a great vision of ’seventies SA, attentive particularly to class/economics, the nature and impact of “coloured” identity, and gender.  The aforementioned _David’s Story_ is about the best novel I’ve read from ‘nineties RSA; this last year her novel _Playing in the Light_ dealt with a “white” woman who uncovers a secret about her family’s history, while also negotiating a burgeoning relationship with a “coloured” woman who works in her office.  What is astonishing about Wicomb is her ability to set points-of-view in relation to one another; _David’s_ has different sections told from different character’s perspectives (and it is a work very much about how those different perspectives alter the story); she has an amazing scene in the newer novel where the two women are on a car drive, and by shifting focus from one character’s pov to the other, she reveals the great chasms between intention and interpretation, inflected by race and class, which make “collective national identity” very, very, very difficult everywhere but perhaps particularly in SA.  She also has an amazing critique, in a throwaway conversation, of the current anxiety about crime.  An Afrikaaner working with the coloured woman bemoans how “those” criminal elements are fucking it all up for many, and the woman responds with a scathing question about how white SA citizens were more than willing to cry through the TRC’s testimony about the experience of being non-white under apartheid but lack any empathy for imagining what it’s like to be non-white after apartheid.

Many SA writers seem to focus on narratives about the recovery of some sense of personal/ethnic  identity, freed to ignore the dominant culture:

Morabo Morojele’s _How We Buried Puso_ is set in Lesotho, obliquely referencing “the country next to ours” and the political oppression and resistance of recent history, but concentrated on a man returning from life in England to his small village, grappling with his brother’s death as a mechanism for remembering his own childhood.  Morojele’s novel is pretty damn good, and despite a more ‘realist’ narrative really grabbed me in moments of both rich political discussion (debates between characters about the richness or poverty of the “we” imagined by the local and state community) and a tough condensed prose style (“It was a place pursed in holding in air: a place going faint and hallucinating slightly in the sun or against the slice of the moon; a place paused against movement . . .”).

Imraan Coovadia makes gleeful and often-biting comedy out of ethnic identity and stereotypes.  His first novel _The Wedding_ imagines the grandparents of the first-person narrator in their (vicious) courtship and eventual emigration to SA from India, and their lives in Durban; the wife is a bilious shrew, the husband a buffoonish dreamer, and at first the novel reads like a parody of those romanticized accountings of how a family came to be–but it becomes, in the growing real relationship of the couple together and in their new community in SA, an interesting way to imagine the conflicts and connections between communities/identities in SA — unromanticized but not wholly ridiculed, either.  His second novel _Green-Eyed Thieves_ also plays with ethnic stereotypes, imagining a larcenous family of Muslim Indians whose conning comments on identity and history (and riffs through an improper retelling of Mohammed Atta’s planning of the 9/11 attacks) in ways that don’t collapse into neat thesis, and seem to me an exciting new engagement with the problems of literary representation in an over-determined history of over-determined racial identities.

Shaun Johnson’s _The Native Commissioner_ is about a white English-speaking Capetonian uncovering a box of papers recounting his father’s position as the titular civic officer, first in a liberal(ish) government but then under the increasing brutalities of the apartheid regime.  The father goes mad dealing with the contradictions, in a manner that is carefully and somewhat effectively clear — I can imagine this novel as a pretty good introduction to the history and the impact of that history…. but I also found it so very very obvious, perhaps true to autobiography and perhaps a useful overview of being a “white African” in RSA, with all of the guilt and shame and complexity that brings, but also painfully earnest.  I had the ending pegged three pages in, and nothing in the novel really surprised or to be honest fully engaged me.  But it WOULD be quite good for a class, I think; I came to it after a lot of reading, and its “flaws” may be more visible to someone so recently and deeply steeped in lots of other SA narratives.

Two different versions of the “white Africans’ story” worked better for me.  Ivan Vladislavic’s _The Restless Supermarket_occurs at the time of transfer of power in the early ‘nineties, and with tremendously playful prose recounts the story of a fairly-bitter English-speaking proofreader who fantasizes a country where editing/correction maintain order against the encroaching chaos; it’s one of those fine novels where the narrator’s pov is always meant to be in question, and I often liked the angry energy of the comedy.  But it’s also less illustrative of the world outside that narrator’s pov (unlike, say, Coetzee’s _Disgrace_, which while trapped in a limited pov also reveals quite a bit about the messiness of the world beyond that character).

Antjie Krog is a poet and journalist, and her nonfiction account of the TRC proceedings, drawing on her reporting, is excellent: _The Country of My Skull_ is  narrative reporting and memoir, essay on Afrikaaner identity and language,  snippets of countless other narratives all given voice together.  It’s a great book, and perhaps the best overview of the TRC and its implications I’ve read.

Lara Foot-Newman’s play “Tshepang” recounts brutal (true) events in a beautiful and haunting fashion; the story concerns the rape of an infant, horror stories which erupted in the country in the last ten years, but does so in a manner which tries to grapple with where such horror emerges, the context.  It avoids all simplistic demonizing, and it is at times surprisingly gorgeous and funny.  A man narrates the whole play, while a silent woman (the mother of the child) engages in activities around him, and his account encapsulates far more than this one horrible narrative.

Zakes Mda has in a number of novels defined a kind of collective, communal narrative voice — he too uses comedic as well as tragic elements, veering in his great first novel _Ways of Dying_ from the clownish narrator (a homeless man making a living as a professional mourner) to events in the settlements that display the brutalities of poverty.  His _Heart of Redness_ moves back and forth in time between a real historical event (Nongquwase, a Xhosa girl, who prophesied a rise against the British if the people slaughtered their cattle, leading to death by starvation of thousands) and more recent collisions between Xhosa, Afrikaans, and other ethnic groups in a post-apartheid community.  _The Madonna of Excelsior_ deals with another true event, the trial of many white men and black women accused of breaking impropriety (anti-miscegenation) laws in a rural town–and again traces the community’s complex inter-ethnic identity over the course of time.  Did I mention he’s funny?  He’ll say something horrible in a throwaway funny line, and a careful, sly wit informs his prose throughout the novels.

Lastly, Phaswane Mpe’s _Welcome to Our Hillbrow_ is another collective narration, across a series of linked short stories set mostly in a neighborhood in Johannesburg, and mostly displaying the ways that urban and rural life are inextricably linked yet often disruptively different.

I have a little stack of others I plan to read and hopefully write on: Marianne van Niekerk’s satirical _Triomf_ (and I hope to get her recent award-winning _Agaat_), Tony Eprile’s _The Persistence of Memory_, David Medalie’s _The Shadow Follows_, Lewis Nkosi’s _Mandela’s Ego_, and two novels by K. Sello Duiker.

Okay, way too long.  But some titles worth reading buried in there….