Light and Time

By Anna Hartford.

Kenyon Review, September 2019.

This is a photograph of my parents from 1988. I saw it for the first time some years ago. A friend of my father’s had uncovered a spool of undeveloped negatives, mostly of my sister and I as girls. In this photo, which was among them, my mother is visiting my father at the COSATU offices in Johannesburg, where he was working at the time. ‘It looks like you’ve been split in two!’ a friend in America wrote to me, after I sent it to her. I was sending it to everyone. Proud to have these cool parents: this woman in her Annie Hall get-up; this man jamming on the floor beside her. Finally, I showed it to my mother, who responded in her familiar deadpan: ‘Dirk pretending to play the bass guitar, and me pretending to be happy.

It’s true. My father can’t really play the bass guitar, and my mother can’t really be happy. She can be many other things though: this acerbic and mischievous, but secretly devout woman. My mother is rigorously unsentimental about photographs. She has never owned a camera. She has kept almost no photographs of her own parents, her siblings, or herself as a child. For the most part I haven’t known these people and now I have no faces for them either. Often I forget their names. Sometimes I misspell her surname. I can’t really speak Afrikaans, her first language. She set out to erase her past from me, and she succeeded, and yet sometimes she seems wounded by her success: that this seemingly immutable lineage was not innate, after all; that it could disappear, just like that, by a simple practice of omission.

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https://www.annahartford.com/writing

Experiments with Truth

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Reading non-fiction across South Africa’s unfinished transition.

Published in the African Articulations series from James Currey / Boydell & Brewer, 2019.
Launch 17:30 Wednesday 5 June, Book Lounge, Cape Town.

I began working on this project in 2007, a time I remember very clearly since I was starting my PhD and living in Johannesburg during the first great era of ‘load shedding’. Load shedding, then Polokwane and the downfall of Thabo Mbeki, then outbreaks of xenophobic violence against African nationals in 2008: it was a moment when the story of post-apartheid South Africa modulated into a more dissonant, diminished key. For some it was the onset of a more fractious and difficult ‘second transition’, as it became clear that the truths and reconciliations of the Mandela years were in some ways illusory, and that the 1990s project of social reckoning and reconstruction had not been nearly deep, honest or durable enough.

At the time, I was reading across a wide range of non-fiction from or about South Africa: dense and passionately researched biographies, memoirs, essays, narrative journalism, social history and more. I was overwhelmed by the ambition and richness of non-fictional forms across 20th-century and contemporary South Africa, particularly since this is a place where the most important intellectual work has often taken place outside of formal institutions: in marginalised, covert, non-academic or exile spaces.

This book is an attempt to give more critical attention to all those kinds of writing that get classed under the dull and inadequate term ‘non-fiction’. It is drawn to those works which are not carriers of pre-existing information but creative treatments of actuality: restless, unstable and even experimental mixtures of the found and the imagined, the received and the wrought.

My alternate title for the book was ‘Unusable Pasts’, which is meant to signal all those stories that don’t fit easy templates of nationalist or public history-making. I am intrigued by those works that can in some way honour the strangeness and resistance that past lives and events should offer to our current desires and projections; that resist the crushingly predictable narrative shapes, orthodox vocabularies and punctual timescales of much public discussion; that seek to reveal human lives as complexly symptomatic of the past, not as simply emblematic of it.

At the heart of the project is Njabulo Ndebele’s insight that the death of apartheid (and the coming of democracy) should be imagined not as an event but a social process: on-going and uneven, happening in different ways and at different tempos, split across institutions and individuals, ranging from the most public languages to the finest tissues of subjectivity, and one that will reach across generations.

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“Historical knowledge streams in unceasingly from inexhaustible wells... The strange and incoherent forces its way forward, memory opens all its gates and yet is not open wide enough, nature struggles to receive, arrange and honour these strange guests.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

Eleventh Hour

“‘Now if someone tells you in dreamtime that you better do something, you better do it.’”

— Abdullah Ibrahim

I see the grey of his hair first as he walks up. He does the namaste greeting and then sits down, much more frail than the last time, at a beautifully miked Yamaha piano in the upstairs theatre. The old stained glass windows of the church it once was are boarded up, but the light of late summer is crashing against and around them, outlining the vaulted shapes. The concert begins at 4 pm.

His hands are tremulous when not on the keyboard. Often he takes his right hand away entirely and touches the corners of his mouth. But he still hits the piano hard when he needs to. Hands trembling above the keys, then smashing down on them, even though the muscle mass has been winnowed away. I see the hands, the hands through which so much has flowed, reflected in the Yamaha. He starts to play Blues for a Hip King, disembodied fragments of it anyway, and my throat closes a little.

After the performance, he takes in the applause, then shuts one ear with his hand and sings a strange, tuneless song that sounds like a spiritual. At one point he stops and seems to glare at an usher who has perhaps opened the doors too early. People are coming out of the main theatre down below, a new musical called Langarm, its posters all over town reading: ‘He was white. She was not. They broke the law to dance’.

The maestro glares at the usher, one hand at his ear, the other palm lifted as if to say: What the – ? Wie’s die moegoe? Still a difficult man, still a badass. ‘A jazz pianist so excessively bitter, rueful and astringent’, wrote Lewis Nkosi in 1966, ‘that anyone able to endure his music for any length of time must often feel compromised in some obscure reluctant corner of the heart’.

The maestro resumes singing, and I can just make out some lines about crossing over the River Jordan. Then he walks off the stage and out, going down into the bright sunshine.

Monsoon Raag

A journey in sound.

Prufrock, May 2019.

The days would begin with singing, but we never quite knew where it was coming from. Male voices in unison drifting into our room while it was still dark, at the edge of waking. Early morning singing or chanting in Fort Kochi, voices coming from…we could never tell exactly: maybe the Basilica, the rooftop mediation hall beyond the football pitch, the Young Men’s Buddhist Association over towards Mattancherry. Days were edged by this unison singing, in and out of sleep, the sound of people beginning the day together.

*

‘Join us for a morning raag’, said the man at the Kathakali Theater, bringing his palms together, bowing slightly, dropping his voice to whisper: ‘Most welcome’. He had one of those voices that tickles the eardrum, that creates ASMR-like shivers even at a distance, that you want never to stop. We would bow and intone it huskily to each other all through two months of travel in south India and Sri Lanka: ‘Most welcome’.

The idea is distinctive to Indian classical music – that certain scales and melodic sets are associated with certain times of day, or seasons of the year: the heat, the rains. But it seems (once you have heard it) utterly logical, beautiful, impossible to do without. A raag, or raga, is not quite a scale (because many ragas can be based on the same scale), and not really a tune (because the same raga can yield an infinite number of tunes.) It has no direct translation in Western music theory, but with it comes the idea that certain patterns of sound have specific effects on the mind and body, that they colour things, hence the Sanskrit origin of the word raag: concerned with pigments and tinting, tingeing or dyeing.

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Into Darkness / Darkness Pass

4.5 hours of solo (only) improvised (mostly) piano.

This is the first part of an extended mix of solo improvised piano that I have put together. It was too large to upload as one file, but parts one (Into Darkness) two (The Fire Within) and three (Darkness Pass) can all be found on Mixcloud with full track listings. Available for download here.

Most of it could be classed as ‘jazz’, but for me the word doesn’t sit right. It is simply solo (only) improvised (mostly) piano, with some exceptions for classical pieces that I really love (and that sound kind of improvised, even though they aren’t). I think Barry Harris was right when he said that 20c improvisers took over where Stravinsky, Schoenberg and the classical avant-garde left off. (That is not to imply an idea of linear progression / development / influence, but rather that different musicians converged on the same harmonic language, and harmonic problems, from different directions.) The first track here, from Nduduzo Makhathini’s momentous 2017 album ‘Reflections’, sounds as much like Webern or Berg as Monk or Ellington. So Bud Powell and Brad Mehldau sound like Bach, and Shostakovich sounds like Bill Evans, who sounds like Debussy, who sounds like Philip Glass.

The whole mix is trying to explore those beautiful regions at the intersections of jazz, extended harmony and modern classical, from the thunderous resonance of McCoy Tyner and Keith Jarrett to the minimalism and quietude of Arvo Pärt and Nils Frahm. It is also weighted towards Africa South because we are so blessed in solo pianistic experimenters: Abdullah Ibrahim, Bheki Mseleku, Moses Molelekwa, Kyle Shepherd, to name only a few that appear here. This first part takes its name from Shepherd's 2012 album recorded in a small village in Japan (on those tracks you can hear the cicadas and nocturnal insects in the background).

The only exceptions to the insistence on solo (only) piano are 1) the impassioned groans from Jarrett (Live at Royal Festival Hall, London 2008, a concert I was fortunate enough to attend) and singing from Mseleku (Meditation Suite, 1994); but these can be put down to ‘vocal acknowledgement’ and 2) Nils Frahm’s Tristana, which slipped through the net, because I forgot that a melodica (?) enters late into the piece (and the mix was recorded in real time, so I couldn’t delete - anyway it's so beautiful). I have also put in some short recordings of my own playing, as a tribute to these masters, and one in particular, but ideally you won’t notice.

Tracklisting:
00:00 Nduduzo Makhathini: Ase (Reflections, 2017) | 04:22 Kyle Shepherd: Ebhofolo (Into Darkness, 2012) | 12:09 Keith Jarrett: Part I: Royal Festival Hall, London (Paris / London: Testament, 2008) | 23:16 Nils Frahm: Ode (Solo, 2015) | 27:44 Brad Mehldau: Waltz for J.B. (10 Years Solo Live, 2015) | 33:53 Max Richter: A Woman Alone (Hostiles, 2018) | 35:44 Bheki Mseleku: Meditation Suite (Meditations, 1994) | 1:08:06 Nduduzo Makhathini: Duduzile (Reflections, 2017) | 1:13:00 Anders Widmark: Din nåd står vakt omkring mitt hus BWV 345 Version I (Piano/Hymn, 2004) | 1:16:54 Sergei Prokofiev: Prelude to Cinderella Suite, Transcribed for Two Pianos | 1:19:27 Ravi Shankar: Venezia (Piano: Florian Uhlig, Venezia, 2001) | 1:24:20 Arvo Pärt: Für Alina (Piano: Alexander Malter, Alina, 1999) | 1:35:14 Keith Jarrett: Part IV: Royal Festival Hall, London (Paris / London: Testament, 2008).

Firepool: Experiences in an Abnormal World

A collection of my essays and creative non-fiction. Kwela Books, 2017.

This is just a glimpse of my Experiences in an Abnormal World. I intend writing a Book if I ever have the opportunity, but medical attention is what I need at present.
Demitrios Tsafendas, Letter from Pretoria Central Prison

Excerpt in The Johannesburg Review of Books, 3 July 2017
The Firepool, Financial Times, 18 August 2017
Interview with Eusebius Mckaiser, Radio 702, 31 August 2017
Top 10 South African books of the year, Sunday Times, 12 December 2017

Real book available from The Book Lounge, Love Books and all good book stores
International shipping from Exclusive Books | E-book available on Amazon

Mentally exhilarating! A book I will return to again and again, both for its uncommon insights, and the quiet beauty of its prose.
Rebecca Davis

Hedley Twidle's work is exquisitely crafted, clever, self-deprecating, and, above all, deeply thoughtful. We are lucky to have a writer of his calibre working on contemporary South African material.
Jonny Steinberg

Hedley Twidle is an essayist of rare brilliance. His reach is remarkable. Whatever subject he touches, his writing is always luminous, astute and often darkly funny.
Rob Nixon

The sequence of the essays behaves almost as a collection of paintings – a polyptych of stories that are each exquisite and then add other layers as they ricochet against one another. 
Business Day

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Teaching / Writing

Creative and otherwise.

Thirteen Ways in At the Foot of the Volcano: Reflections on Teaching at a South African University. ed. Susan Levine. HSRC Press, 2018.

... Showing examples of Cubism alongside such a poem is effective, of course, since students of the twenty-first century have visual literacy skills that are immensely advanced: the challenge is to get them to ‘translate’ such analytic techniques from the visual to the textual. Which is not always easy: ‘One can accept a Picasso woman with two noses,’ John Ashbery remarks in The Paris Review, ‘but an equivalent attempt in poetry baffles the same audience’.

Without mentioning structuralism or De Saussure or using the word ‘signifier’, I also tried to broach the idea that ‘blackbird’ could in one sense be seen as an entirely arbitrary choice, easily replaceable with another word in this verbal algorithm. An ex-colleague of mine (now at Wits University) had been compulsively working up variations of the poem on his Facebook wall, and I shared one of them:

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of J.M. Coetzee.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three J.M. Coetzees.

[…]

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That J.M. Coetzee is involved
In what I know.

N2

Reading, writing, walking the South African highway.

Social Dynamics 43:1 (2017).
Less academic version appears as 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at the N2' in Firepool.

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 2 000 kilometres, then bends north and west below Swaziland to end at the town of Ermelo in the province of Mpumalanga.

Major highways are not thought about much. They are pieces of infrastructure that (if working as intended) efface themselves, receding from view in the mirror. In his 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 under-explored not because it is remote and inaccessible but because it is so ubiquitous and familiar.’

Perhaps because of the late age at which I (after many failed attempts) got my driver’s licence, piloting vehicles along strips of tarmac has never quite lost its strangeness for me, and the psychology and social behaviours associated with driving are, I believe, complex and neglected domains. With the passing of the era of cheap oil, future humanity will look back on our cities with wonder, disbelief and disgust at how totally urban spaces were shaped around the velocities and demands of the private vehicle. So, an important strategy for environmental writing in the 21st century might be to estrange the practice of everyday life, to conduct an anthropology not of the distant and exotic, but rather of the near, the mundane, the everyday.

‘What speaks to us, seemingly,’ wrote Georges Perec in 1973, ‘is always the big event, the untoward, the extraordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motorcars is to drive into plane trees.’ But, he goes on, in our haste to measure ‘the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coalmines. “Social problems” aren’t “a matter of concern” when there’s a strike, they are intolerable twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.’

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Sea Power

From Cape Town to Dar es Salaam, and back again.

Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard (excerpts) | Africa is a Country | 10 September 2013.
With photographs by David Southwood | Memory Card Sea Power.

A genre-busting book, Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard does a rare thing: it is non-fiction that breaks the mould of works that look in on the continent from the outside. It shows the ancient and complex connections that exist within and beyond African borders in emotional, historical, cultural and metaphysical ways that others shirk from.
Billy Kahora