Cecil Rhodes: My Part in His Downfall

Literature in the time of decolonization.

My attempt to make sense of the coincidence of MAN Booker International and the Rhodes Must Fall movement at the University of Cape Town. Including one amazing fact you never knew (or needed to know) about the Rhodes statue...

The Essay: Life and Arts. Financial Times,3 April 2015.

See also: The Atlantic, 25 April 2015.

Just uphill from Rhodes, toward Table Mountain, I spotted a second, smaller plinth. On top of the pedestal stood a striking black woman, with her back to the statue and her face, obscured by a traditional beaded veil, angled down as if she was meditating. She wore a black leotard and had a quite untraditional pair of shiny stilettos on her feet.

The woman was Sethembile Msezane, an MFA candidate at the university and a Zulu-speaking performance artist from Soweto, outside Johannesburg. She’d made it her trademark on public holidays to juxtapose her young, black, female body with monuments of old, white, male colonial and Apartheid-era figures, and to turn up in silent vigil at sites of resistance to oppression.

Lapsed South Africans

Wolf, Wolf: A Novel, by Eben Venter, translated by Michiel Heyns.

Financial Times.13 March, 2015.

...The Chekhovian pistol in this work is not hanging on the wall but hidden in a drum of organic lentils. And even though it doesn’t actually go off in the final act, in another sense it absolutely does...

Index

Found poem

I always suspected the city was a falsification
I arrived too late
I bought it from a street vendor in Naples
I cannot find the title
I cannot remember
I can still adjust the devotional picture so your reconciliation with necessity may be known
I couldn't choose
I did not learn this today
I don't know who (who the hell)
I bequeath to the four elements
I don't understand how you can write poems about the moon

I Gave My Word
I have never believed in the spirit of history
I just close my eyes

N2: A Bibliography

Cityscapes, Issue 05. April 2014.

You see them all along the N2: a red circle bisected diagonally, the universal code for no, not allowed, don’t, though in this case the line is drawn not through a cigarette or a knife but a thumbs-up. The sign means “no hitchhiking”, but if you are lucky enough to be flashing by in a vehicle it can produce an instant of cognitive dissonance (anti-good times, anti-like?). In 2014 the sign is hardly true to life—it has been outstripped by rising petrol prices and hard-nosed financial logic. Most people waiting on hard shoulders on the N2 hold currency in the air: ten, twenty, fifty rands. It is also a simple lesson in semiotics: even the simplest, most programmatic signs—whether pictographic, linguistic or property of the South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL)—can be infiltrated by unintended and contradictory meanings.

N2. Curled up in that tiny alphanumeric are thousands of kilometres, hundreds of service stations, millions of tons of concrete. N2 can mean a London bus route; an intelligence officer in the US Navy; an anti-nuclear song by the Japanese indie group Asian Kung Fu Generation. But for my purposes it is the longest highway in South Africa, which starts at an unfinished flyover near the docks in Cape Town, follows the eastern seaboard of the country (roughly) for over 2000 kilometres, then bends west below Swaziland to end at the town of Ermelo in the province of Mpumalanga. Major highways like the N2 are not liked, or at least, not thought about much.

Writing a hidden history of the UK’s motorway system, Joe Moran suggests that this bland corporate terrain of tarmac, underpasses and thermoplastic road markings is “the most commonly viewed and least contemplated landscape” in Britain. “The road is almost a separate country, one that remains underexplored not because it is remote and inaccessible but because it is so ubiquitous and familiar.” 

Juice Time

A wayward tribute to Alice Munro... and Raymond E. Feist.

Republished at Books of the Year, 21 January 2015.

Electricity gone down from Flower Road to Davenport. No internet on a Sunday. Peace.Electricity gone down from Flower Road to Davenport. No internet on a Sunday. Peace.

Yesterday’s swimming is still in me, in my shoulders and hair. Clifton 3 ½ beach with A. We splash out to the rock, but are too cautious to jump off it, slide back into the water over the barnacles. We run into Anna, Jemma and their friends, in knitted swimwear and dungarees. ‘Mary’s daughters’, says A., ‘They march to the sound of their own djembe.’ The beach is packed: the real girls thread their way between the incorrigible babes, looking for a place. Today the wind has stopped entirely and I want to go back. But she is having lunch with her grandparents and I know that a swim that perfect comes only once a year.

Reluctant to start work over the last weeks: lazy, a little depressed. To remedy it I try to break all routines, to force the days into new shapes. Sitting in a Turkish steam room in mid-afternoon. Shopping for shirts with D. at 9am, when the Waterfront is deserted. We have fish and chips at 11am and he says the harbour scene reminds him of the Canadian island where he grew up. Not the motorized pirate boat pulling out with the tourists, but the cranes and industrial mess behind. I ask if he is proud of Alice Munro and the Nobel.

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A Literary Con

The ‘memoirs’ of Herman Charles Bosman and Dugmore Boetie. 

Conference of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), New York University, 20-23 March 2014.

After a while, I think, the wit begins to pall. Ironic inversions are worked compulsively just once too often. Irony, as Roland Barthes has noted, remains safe, it keeps its distance [...] There are too many knowing winks travelling between narrator and reader. Prison and its ways are held at a comfortable distance. We find ourselves laughing when sometimes we should, perhaps, be asking questions [...] This irony touches upon awkward questions – innocence (what is innocence?), justice (whose justice?), prison (is it really rehabilitative?) – but lets them all pass in laughter. (142)

Yes, Bosman, you old lag, with your wheedling voice, half conning us, half conning yourself, talking out of the side of your mouth, wink, wink, wink, popping your eyes and whispering down the decades out of that Cold Stone Jug. (143)

Jeremy Cronin, ‘Inside Out: Bosman’s Cold Stone Jug’. In Stephen Gray (ed.), Herman Charles Bosman. Johannesburg: MacGraw-Hill, 1986.

In How Fiction Works, James Wood distinguishes between reliably unreliable narrators in literature (fairly common and generally identifiable) and the rarer, more disquieting case of unreliably unreliable narrators. This paper relocates his insight to the ostensibly non-fictional works of two South African comic writers: the urban sketches of Herman Charles Bosman, collected in A Cask of Jerepigo (1957), and the prose cycle that makes up Dugmore Boetie’s ‘experimental autobiography’ Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost (1969). Often compared in South Africa, yet little known elsewhere, Bosman and Boetie trade in forms of comedy and irony that, I suggest, are uniquely unstable. With satiric targets and strategies liable to shift disconcertingly from paragraph to paragraph, a ‘politics’ that is wilfully opaque and illegible, and a deliberately cultivated sense of tastelessness and irresponsibility – their texts are perhaps best described as elaborately rigged confidence tricks, often at the expense of the earnest, bien pensant reader. Nonetheless (as glutton for punishment), I will attempt to trace the workings of a complicitous and guilty narrative pleasure: a strain of South African comic vernacular that is echoed in the work of later writers like John Matshikiza, Marlene van Niekerk and Ivan Vladislavic. I will also reflect on the difficulty of teaching (and then resolving never to teach) Bosman and Boetie in the multiracial context of a South African university – perhaps out of an anxiety that students might not ‘get the joke’; or perhaps because they have intuited that some jokes are not worth getting.

13 (and a bit) sentences from 2013

He could see, for instance, that a certain key would not fit the lock, and yet he continued to try and insert it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1886).

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He played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to…But a logic was operating, a logic unique to Monk: if you always played the least expected note a form would emerge, a negative imprint of what was initially anticipated.

Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful (1991).

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I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929).

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Wel I cant say for cern no mor if I had any of them things in my mynd befor she tol me but ever since then it seams like they all ways ben there. Seams like I ben all ways thinking on that thing in us what thinks us but it dont think like us. Our woal life is a idea we dint think of nor we dont know what it is. What a way to live.

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980).

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Indefinite Delay

The Last Days of Nelson Mandela.

New Statesman, 10 October 2013. Cover Story.

In 1977 a group of journalists was permitted to visit Robben Island as part of a government attempt to convince the outside world that conditions there were not as bad as widely believed. There is a photograph of Nelson Mandela from that outing, one rarely included among iconic images of the man. He leans on a spade, his face closed with anger or disdain. Rediscovered in the archives long after the fall of apartheid, the photograph has a caption that reads: “466/64 ’n Gevangene werksaam in die tuin” – “a prisoner industrious in the garden”.

There are several ironies surrounding this image. Mandela wears sunglasses here; we now know that years of working in the lime quarries of the Island damaged his eyesight permanently, affecting his tear ducts and even (so it is said) making it impossible for him to cry. The Afrikaans caption tries, absurdly, to make the world’s best-known political prisoner into an anonymous labourer – or, to use a phrase that has not entirely disappeared from some corners of South Africa, into a “garden boy”.

Prisoner 466/64 did have a vegetable patch in the prison courtyard on Robben Island where he tended chilli and tomato plants. When transferred to another prison on the mainland in 1982, Mandela presided over a large and productive rooftop garden, made from sawn-off oil drums filled with soil. “The Bible tells us that gardens preceded gardeners,” we read in his 1994 autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, “but that was not the case at Pollsmoor.” But the 1977 photograph was taken against his will, and the strip of gravel shown in it was no garden – hence, perhaps, the look of disdain at this tawdry attempt to manipulate and meddle in his own careful, self-created mythology.

Read more…

The Childhood of Jesus

Financial Times, 8 March 2013.

Getting Past Coetzee

In the shadow of the Nobel laureate.

Financial Times, 28 December 2012.

There remains the matter of getting past Coetzee. Dusklands (1974).

There is an odd made-for-television documentary from 1997 which shows footage of JM Coetzee conducting a guided tour of Cape Town’s southern suburbs. From the slopes of Table Mountain he points out the hospital where he was born; the suburb of Plumstead where he lived as a young boy; the university campus where he spent much of his academic career. A colleague recalls how Coetzee would not take calls from the Booker prize committee because he was invigilating undergraduate exams: a measure of his professionalism. We visit his Standard Three classroom at Rosebank Primary and the grassy common where he participated in school sports days. He recalls taking gold in the running backwards race of 1948, as if enjoying a wry joke at the expense of anyone who thought that such an exercise might grant some privileged insight into his work... 
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First published in Bokvennen litterært magasin | Oslo | nr. 3.12

These somewhat unfair thoughts are stirred by Disgrace, which is a very good novel, almost too good a novel...It sometimes reads as if it were the winner of an exam whose challenge was to create the perfect specimen of a very good contemporary novel.

James Wood, ‘Coetzee's Disgrace: A Few Skeptical Thoughts’, The Irresponsible Self (2004).