The Interpreters

The Interpreters

My introduction to this anthology of 21st-century nonfiction.

Using the term “nonfiction” (some writers of it have remarked) is about as useful as calling the clothes in your wardrobe “nonsocks”, or saying that you had “nongrapefruit” for breakfast. A broad spectrum of compelling, ambitious and artful literature shelters within that unhelpful “non”. This includes: narrative and longform journalism; essays and memoir; reportage, features and profiles; life writing in its many variants, from private diaries to public biography; oral histories, interviews and testimony – all those forms caught up in the alchemy of spoken becoming written.

Across three decades of democracy, South Africa has – like many places undergoing complex and uneven social change – seen an outpouring of remarkable nonfiction. Collected here is the work in prose of thirty-seven authors, all of it writing (also some drawing: comics and graphic nonfiction) concerned with actual people, places and events. Actual rather than real, since a character in a novel might be powerfully real for a reader, even when invented or imaginary. Fiction in the first person can, after all, impersonate every technique known to autobiography (and has often done so, right back to the beginnings of the novel). Whereas (the other side of the coin) writing about a real- life person does not guarantee that the subject will come to life, or be realised, on the page.

So when and why does this happen? How is it that human beings become vital, vivid and (see Lin Sampson’s portrait of bouncer, breker and photographer Billy Monk) indelible via words? When does nonfiction become not just a way of delivering information but an artform in its own right?

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Anybody Can

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Anybody Can

When Louis Armstrong met August Musarurwa.

Anybody Can, in Your History with Me: The Films of Penny Siopis, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Duke University Press, 2024).

“Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’s music.” — Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.

1.

The African Dance Band of the Cold Storage Commission of Southern Rhodesia – it was the band with the longest name in the world. The words appear as faded images flicker across the screen: tobacco auctions, tourist cruises on the Zambezi river. A languorous saxophone plays.

So begins Penny Siopis’s ‘Welcome Visitors!’, a filmic reimagining of the life and music of August Musarurwa. Musarurwa was a bandleader and saxophonist who learned the instrument while working as a police interpreter in Bulawayo in the 1940s. The torrents and cataracts of the Zambezi keep unspooling as we hear the tune that made him famous: ‘Skokiaan’. The crackle of old vinyl joins the mottled footage – of farm labour, dance performances and colonial officials with awkward body language – and the original begins to play. Some quick-strumming banjos mark out a carnival rhythm, then comes a long, bending note on Musarurwa’s sax, sliding down to a riff that everyone knows.

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A Line of Light

A Line of Light

Literatures of dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease and lost memories.

Writing Forgetting, Departmental Seminar, English Literary Studies, University of Cape Town. 7 August 2024. Archive of forgetfulness.

When I finished school, my parents moved from a mining town outside Johannesburg to the coast where we had gone for family holidays, over a thousand kilometres away. My father wanted to leave his old life behind. He got rid of almost all our possessions and bought a flat – the unit, he would always call it – in a new housing complex. He and my mother made the long drive down in separate vehicles. She had once owned a mustard-yellow Ford Escort, but that had gone too. They convoyed south in two company cars that my father had lovingly cared for and then bought from the mine, two grey Audis.

They drove across the Highveld and the Free State, across the Karoos great and small, through the Swartberg and over the Outeniquas. South to a new life, caught up in the transitions of the 1990s. Except that, several times towards the end of the journey, they became separated on the roads. My father looked in the rear-view mirror and my mother was no longer there. Or maybe it was dark and he assumed that the headlights behind him were those of his wife when in fact she was lost. She had taken a wrong turn somewhere in the winding poorts and passes that deliver you from the interior to the coast. My father backtracked and found her eventually, disorientated and tearful in the George traffic department, or maybe it was Wilderness.

She put it down to the stress of the move, the long drive. But looking back, it must have been – like the muddling of names and the missing of finer points – a sign of the Alzheimer’s disease she was diagnosed with not long afterwards. At 59 years old, she suffered an early-onset, aggressive form of this dementia. Soon she could no longer drive at all. She spent most of her days in the sparse rooms of the unit and the grounds of the complex. She died eight years later, which is a typical length of time for this form of dementia.

Sometimes during those eight years, I wondered if she should rather have vanished on those dark roads, and so been spared what came after. There are many things that I wish I had read, known and thought before the forgetting came upon her. These are some of them.

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Show Me the Place

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Show Me the Place

Searching for utopia.

We were on our way to Pondicherry in a Hindustan Ambassador, one of those classic 1950s-looking cars you see all through India. But this one had been modified, he said, so that it ran on recycled ayurvedic massage oil. He was taking me to a microbrewery in town, as if to show that this place had everything from back home and more.

Sometimes I wondered if Zuckman was stretching the truth a little. He was such an evangelist for this part of the world. He was older than me but looked more youthful; he glowed with a zealous optimism that I associated more with the corporate sector. But so far everything he’d said — about being a Sanskrit scholar, about leaving Muizenberg to come and run his software company from Auroville — had checked out…

An extract from Show Me the Place about a visit to the ‘living laboratory’ (residents don’t like the term utopia) of Auroville in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Sunday Times online, 30 April 2024. Pagecast interview with Mila de Villiers.

Earlier in this piece, I describe coming across a copy of Ursula Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed in the (beautiful) Auroville Library. A science fictional utopia embedded in a real attempt at living differently – this became a kind of touchstone. It seemed like an emblem of how imaginary and actual experiments with better worlds have always nestled within, always co-existed and co-created each other. How the literary and political imagination have always depended on one other for showing that things have not always been as they are (and so could one day be otherwise again).

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Five by Three

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Five by Three

The part about the island.

There was a phone box upslope from the youth hostel. It stood out on the hillside, a dab of red against the greens and greys. It was the same colour as my bike panniers, waxy red and waterproof, that had carried everything I needed over the last weeks, through the wind and rain.

That was a good feeling. Striking camp, slotting the panniers back on the bike, being on your way. And so was rolling on and off the ferries ahead of the cars.

You watched an island approach, like this one with its terracotta cliffs and a rock pillar rising from the waves. The shoreline slowly resolved: a boatyard, a hotel on the pier, a distillery. White and grey pebbledash houses with laundry lines outside, clothes snapping in the wind.

The ferry bumped against the tyres of the pier, the ramp clunked down. The line of wet tarmac stretched out ahead, glowing when some light came through the clouds. Just a single lane with some passing places for cars, but there were none. This island was wilder and emptier than the others.

So I didn’t expect the phone box to be in use, but I could see someone, two people, through the glass slats.

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Becoming Visible

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Becoming Visible

Seismic surveys, oceanic noise and submarine listening.

Excerpt from Sounding Environments (with Aragorn Eloff) in The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History. Edited by Emily O'Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart. December 2023. Outtakes.

‘I am not prepared to mourn my coastline’ – in her director’s statement for the 2018 sound and video work Becoming Visible, Janet Solomon discusses her attempt to represent the acoustic violence unleashed by seismic surveys off the southern African coastline. Launched by the South African government in 2014, Operation Phakisa (to ‘hurry up’ in Sesotho) aims to ‘unlock the economic potential’ of the country’s maritime territories (more than double its terrestrial size) and to develop the ‘blue economy’. With this comes, Solomon writes, ‘an escalating and unrelenting push for oil and gas development along the east coast of South Africa’ (2018). The KwaZulu-Natal coastline, she goes on, experienced its highest ever recording of whale strandings during and after a 2016 marine seismic survey looking for oil and gas reserves, a survey granted an extension into the whale migration season.

Working via multi-channel video and sound, Becoming Visible seeks to bring home the effects of the multi-beam bathymetric sonar used to establish the topography of the sea floor. This is a method involving towed arrays of air guns, which issue pulses of over 200 decibels every ten seconds, for 24 hours a day (human eardrums typically burst at 160 decibels). The challenge presented by the work is its invitation for human listeners (with hearing evolved in the medium of air) to comprehend the very different sonic environment of a watery, submarine space. Soundwaves behave differently below the ocean surface (where hydrophones pick up the same level of sound 12 kilometres away from sources as from two kilometres away). They are faster, more far-reaching and less avoidable for marine organisms (who ‘hear’ with their whole body) even while going (to human ears) largely unheard. How then can regulatory frameworks and environmental impact assessments be extended into worlds set apart from or beyond the human sensorium? Who is listening for, or to, our companion species in the oceans?

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Playlists

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Music for quiet cats.

Alpha
Andata
Anemelia
Aurora
Blooms
Care
Dive
Flee
Flight
Hyperballad
Layers
Loved
Oculus
Onward
Prelude
Re
Shant
Signal
Sisyphe
Somer
Spheres
Tributary
Unfurl
Unravel

What is it that repeatedly presents itself to my mind? It is this: the coronal suture of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has – let us assume – a certain similarity to the closely wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing which was not derived from the graphic translation of a sound, but existed of itself naturally – well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen?

A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds, music … feelings – which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe – which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world … Leaving that side for the moment: what variety of lines then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?

— Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Primal Sound’ (1919)

To Spite His Face

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Detail from CJR, a mixed-media artwork by Mikhael Subotzky.

How Rhodes lost his nose.

Letter from Cape Town. Harper’s December 2021 (& podcast).

The nose disappeared from Cecil Rhodes’s face in September 2015. It was sliced off the bronze bust in the Rhodes Memorial on the slopes of Table Mountain. The plinth below was spray-painted: THE MASTER’S NOSE BETRAYS HIM. Since then, the appendage has been at large. Was it stashed at the back of some cupboard or put to use as a paperweight? Did it go underground at a safe house, or was it ironically mounted on the wall by student comrades? Maybe it fled to New Zealand, trying to shuck off its colonial past and live in peace.

I work at the university just downslope from the memorial, and around the time of the disappearance, I was teaching Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 story “The Nose.” In it, the nose of a St. Petersburg bureaucrat, Major Kovalyov, vanishes under mysterious circumstances. He wakes up to find a blankness, “quite flat, just like a freshly cooked pancake,” in the middle of his face. We follow this hapless and petty man as he tries to find and confront his nose, which has taken on a life of its own. It is gallivanting round town, wearing a uniform of higher rank than the major, disowning him at every opportunity. “Whatever you may say, these things do happen in this world,” the narrator reflects. “Rarely, I admit, but they do happen.”

So when Rhodes’s nose vanished, I felt intrigued and somehow implicated. I admired the gesture. Each year, as I taught the Gogol again, I was reminded of the unsolved mystery, and would ask for information at the end of lectures, promising to protect my sources. I dreamed of holding that bronze nodule in the palm of my hand. I wondered where it had been and what its adventures might reveal. At a time when political and cultural debates seemed so fraught, I wanted to understand this more cryptic element of the decolonization process.

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Matching Shadows

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Matching Shadows

Landscape, photography, environmental memory.

Remembering the Plant Conservation Unit. Business Day, 14 September 2021.
Safundi 22 (2022). Roundtable on University of Cape Town fire of April 2021.

A photo within a photo within a photo: the Mirabib inselberg in the Namib Desert. The innermost image is from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured this landscape during the opening sequences (Kubrick's team also cut down several ancient kokerbooms, illegally, since he was fascinated by the tree and had plastic models made for the film).

I wrote about the repeat photography project run by Timm Hoffman and the University of Cape Town’s Plant Conservation Unit, which burned down earlier this year. (It wasn't the first conflagration they've had to endure. In 2016, the PCU's Mazda bakkie was set alight during protests, a vehicle that had taken students all around the country, and linked the university to a remote Namaqualand town for over 20 years. But that, as they say, is another story.)

The physical pictures, plates and negatives may have burned, but over 30 000 images exist on the digital database. And so the invitation to be part of the project, to find these sites and re-take the photos, lives on in virtual space.

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Dirty Butter

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Dirty Butter

Artificial Selection by Elize Vossgätter.

Catalogue essay, August 2021. Everard Read gallery, Cape Town.

In 1880, a German pharmacist named George Grübler started a business in Leipzig, manufacturing a dye called gentian violet. The name came from the Gentiana, a genus of flowering plants with petals ranging from deep blue through indigo to the end of the spectrum; but the colour was entirely synthetic.

Gentian violet was one of the aniline dyes that emerged in quick succession after the discovery of mauveine in the mid-19th century. Colour was denaturalised, industrialised: no longer just a precious pigment extracted from the natural world, but now also something mass-produced by chemists fiddling with molecules, and sold by the tonne to the garment industry. Grübler sold his dye mainly to biologists for histological staining: i.e. to stain cell walls, organelles and chromosomes, so as to probe their microscopic structure. Gentian violet was used by early geneticists and the cancer researchers who developed chemotherapy. Today it remains vital in the classification of bacteria, producing slides stippled with pink and purplish specks.

Using artificial colour to render complex or intractable natural structures: not dissimilar to the way climatologists code weather maps (with new shades of violet for unprecedented heat waves as we move further into the Anthropocene). Or, at the other end of the scale, the way astronomers picture impossibly distant phenomena via ‘false colour’ images. Arbitrary palettes are assigned to encode intensities and wavelengths lying outside human apprehension – the ultraviolets and distant radio galaxies that show up as tiny flecks or blurry chromosomes.

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What the World Has Lost

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What the World Has Lost

The Sixth Extinction as elegy, tragedy, comedy.

In Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying, edited by Bongani Kona. Jonathan Ball, 2021. Photograph by Tommaso Fiscaletti and Nic Grobler from Hemelliggaam or The Attempt to Be Here Now.

1.
The first was caused, some say, by plants: primitive mosses and liverworts that moved from ocean to land, absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing phosphates from the soil and rocks they grew on. These previously locked-up elements washed into rivers and seas, fertilising vast algal blooms: red and green tides that rotted and sank, the bacteria turning the oceans hypoxic (too little oxygen), then anoxic (no oxygen). Marine animals died off and global CO2 levels dropped further, since there was no more O2 to bind with C in the water. Instead this singular element at the heart of all life was interred on the seabed as shale, in a process known as carbon burial. Half-a-billion-year-old black shales mark the End Ordovician, a 44 million-year cold snap now understood as the first of six mass extinctions in earth history.

You can say them like a litany: End Ordovician, Late Devonian, End Permian – the third, the biggest of them all, sometimes called The Great Dying. 250 million years ago, colossal volcanic eruptions and lava flows form country-sized ‘flood basalts’ and ‘igneous provinces’: stepped mountain ranges now called the Siberian Traps (from the Swedish for steps: trappa). Pyroclastic explosions ignite coal beds and release vast sinks of methane into the atmosphere. It’s even worse in the oceans, where anaerobic bacteria take over, emitting hydrogen sulphide and even changing the planet’s colouration to a world of glassy, purple seas and pale green, sulphurous skies.

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Barbarian Phase

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Barbarian Phase

A surfing half-life.

Wasafiri, June 2021. Short edit for Life supplement, Business Day, 27 August 2019. Locals only version below, and also published on Wavescape. Image of Sunset reef by Sean Thompson Surfography.

Thirty-six is no longer young, promising, or even emerging. It’s one year too late to be a member of the Youth League and twenty years too late to start surfing, especially in the wild and freezing waters off Cape Town.

All that lost time weighs on us, Alex and me, as we watch teenagers or outright children paddle onto some heaving Atlantic swell, make the drop, carve some shapes along the purling, blue-green wall and then kick out like it was the easiest thing in the world.

‘Poets,’ he would say, beard in hand, as we watched from a car park in the depths of winter, when the swells come in, ‘There are poets among us.’

Alex and I both have beards that are beginning to go silver, but I am average height and skinny while he is tall and rangy, muscular. We are both only children, sort of, both loners who like having someone to play with, now and then. We both have outlandish surnames that nobody can spell or pronounce.

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Nineteen Eighty-Six

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Nineteen Eighty-Six

William Dicey’s 1986 (and other ‘year-books’).

Business Day , 4 May 2021.

In 1986, Halley’s Comet reached perihelion, its point closest to the sun, for the first time since 1910. The Challenger Space Shuttle exploded, and so did a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Mozambiquan President Samora Machel died in a suspicious air crash and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was gunned down in Stockholm. Diego Maradona scored his ‘Hand of God’ goal against England in the 1986 football World Cup.

At the 27th Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the keywords of his mandate: ‘Glasnost’ and ‘Perestroika’. The African National Congress in exile could no longer count on the same level of Soviet support – in 1985, the shopping list had run to 60 cars, 6 buses, 240 tons of soap, 16 000 tubes of toothpaste and 4000 brassieres.

Winnie Mandela gave her infamous necklacing speech, and apartheid spy Craig Williamson ensured the footage was shown wherever Oliver Tambo held a press conference. ‘When the Going Gets Tough’ by Billy Ocean topped the international charts; on the local billboard it was Sipho Hotstix Mabuse with ‘Let’s Get it On’. Shaka Zulu and Knight Rider screened on TV. Paul Simon violated the cultural boycott by recording Graceland. Musician-activist Steven van Zandt (later Tony Soprano’s right-hand man) stepped up his ‘I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City’ campaign, but advised the Azanian People’s Organisation to take Simon off their hit list: ‘The war I’m about to fight it a tricky one in the media…It’s not going to help if you assassinate Paul Simon, okay?’ Eugene Terre-Blanche, leader of the white supremacist AWB, told reporters that his open-handed salute was an old German greeting meaning ‘I come in peace’: ‘How can I help it if Hitler also used it?’

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Testimony

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Sliding puzzles, truth games, split screens.

Profile of artist Sue Williamson. Financial Times, 20 February, 2021.
Image above from It’s a pleasure to meet you (2016).

In one screen of this two-channel video installation is a young woman, Candice Mama. She tells the story of encountering Eugene de Kock: commander of apartheid’s most notorious death squads and the man who killed her father. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you’ is what De Kock says to her and each family member when they meet him in prison, while a pastor presides. She speaks of being convinced by his sincerity and remorse. A photograph flashes up of the family smiling broadly as if posing with a celebrity. But the celebrity is apartheid’s chief killer, in maximum-security jumpsuit, thick glasses and sinister side fringe. ‘Do you forgive yourself?’, Mama asks De Kock. He replies that nobody who has done the things he has done can forgive themselves.

In the other screen is a young man, Siyah Ndawela Mgoduka, listening. He also lost his father, but his only contact with the killers is a memory of being given the middle finger across a TRC hearing by a security policeman. Mgoduka cannot quite bring himself to believe in the story being related so sincerely right next to him (even as he might want to). It is a story which has the sound of having been told many times before, of having become (as many TRC cases did) an exemplary tale, a parable.

Why the ‘dress up’, asks Mgoduka, and why was there a pastor there? Why the rush to forgive, when it might all happen too quickly, and leave you with unprocessed anger? He speaks of the TRC as a gift that was offered, an opportunity for white South Africans at large, but one which was not taken. Or else taken for granted, with (like so much else in the country) someone else doing the heavy lifting: ‘You can’t be the one who’s arrogant when I’m forgiving you.’

As Others Feel Pain in their Lungs

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As Others Feel Pain in their Lungs

On Albert Camus’s The Plague: Part Two.

Part One.
Condensed version in The Plague Years: Reflecting on Pandemics. Routledge: 2022.
Podcast with Bongani Kona, The Empty Chair, for SA PEN.

Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at this moment, as others feel pain in their lungs. — Albert Camus, ‘Letter to an Algerian Militant’.

for D.B. (1981-2020)

1.
In March 1900, a ship called the SS Kilburn arrived in Cape Town from the grain-exporting port of Rosario, Argentina. It was carrying fodder for the horses of the British army, then fighting against the Boer republics in the South African War: the late imperial catastrophe that would incubate Afrikaner nationalism in the 20th century.

Five crew members were ill and the captain had died a day before docking. A quarantine camp was set up in Saldanha Bay and the crew taken there under armed guard. But by September 1900 large numbers of rats were dying in the Cape Town docks. ‘The stench was unendurable’, an officer reported to the Plague Advisory Board: ‘they had to have the floors up to remove the dead rats. He himself had seen numbers of sick rats coming out to the open in daylight, in a dazed state so that you could catch them with your hand’ (cited in Phillips 42-3).

In early 1901, a number of cases were reported among dockworkers who had been unloading the grain and fodder that harboured rats (and their fleas carrying the plague bacillus.) Tented camps were set up: first on the beach, then at Uitvlugt Forest Station, a few kilometres away from the city centre. Using a Public Health Act introduced in 1883 after a smallpox epidemic, the city’s Medical Officer ordered that over 6000 black Africans living in the city centre were to be forcibly removed from their homes and marched there.

Untouched by the sixth-century Plague of Justinian and medieval Europe’s Black Death, southern Africa was now part of the so-called Third Pandemic. It began in Chinese ports in 1894 and encircled the globe for the next decade, a seaborne epidemic carried along the global shipping routes established by European colonialism. Burgeoning trade, growing ports, bigger ships and cargos – all these made it easier for rats and their fleas to cross oceans. The medical and official response was also ‘uniquely imperial’, write Beinart and Hughes in their history of environment and empire (169). Plague outbreaks were met with segregationist controls ‘which had less to do with epidemiological requirements than socio-political ones. Everywhere it went, plague triggered a crisis in both state medicine and relations between rulers and subjects’ (169).

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We Are All in the Plague

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We Are All in the Plague

On Albert Camus’s The Plague: Part One.

Summer School, University of Cape Town, 2021.
Condensed version in English Studies in Africa 64:1-2 (2021).
Podcast with Bongani Kona, The Empty Chair, for SA PEN.

She taught me to read the book in a certain way, tilting it sideways as though to make invisible details fall out. — Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation.

for D.B. (1981-2020)

1.
In 1947, Albert Camus published La peste, the story of a town struck by bubonic plague. He judged the book a failure, but The Plague is probably his most successful and widely-read work.

In one sense it is a simple story. Rats come out of cellars and sewers, spitting blood, and begin to die in the streets. Then people begin to die. The town is sealed off and we follow the experiences of a small band of characters as they battle the epidemic. Like a classical tragedy, the book is divided into five acts. In parts one and two, the death toll is rising; in part three it is at its height: ‘the plague had covered everything’. In parts four and five, the disease slowly retreats, and the town is liberated again. Amid the celebrations, the narrator strikes a note of foreboding, and the famous ending reads as follows:

Indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy that rose above the town, Rieux recalled that this joy was always under threat. He knew that this happy crowd was unaware of something that one can read in books, which is that the plague bacillus never dies or vanishes entirely; it can remain dormant for dozens of years in furniture or clothing; it waits patiently in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, handkerchiefs and old papers, and perhaps the day will come when, for the instruction or misfortune of mankind, the plague will rouse its rats and send them to die in some well-contented city. (237-38)

If you type ‘camus the plague’ into an image search, the huge archive of different book covers gives an idea of how many times this 20th-century classic has been read, translated, reprinted and repackaged. The more literal approaches go for rats and scythes; the more abstract show empty seascapes or dotted geometric patterns that could be microbes or epidemiologists’ models.

There is the photogenic Camus himself, in a famous Henri Cartier-Bresson portrait with cigarette and turned up collar. On one cover he has the eerie, beak-shaped mask of the Plague Doctor graffitied over his face. Used by physicians in Italian cities where the mortality rates reached up to 60% (in 1656, some 150 000 died in Naples alone), these 17th-century respirators had glass discs in front of the eyes and two openings just below each nostril. The ‘beak’ was filled with dried flowers like roses and carnations, herbs like mint, spices, camphor, juniper and ambergris, laudanum, myrrh, straw, perhaps a sponge of vinegar – anything to ward of the ‘miasma’ or bad air (Italian: mal aria) that was thought to spread contagion prior to the germ theory of modern medicine. ‘The inhabitants accused the wind of carrying the seeds of infection’ (130), we hear at one point in The Plague, a residue of the superstition that warm southerlies like the sirocco wafted plague particles across the Mediterranean from the deserts of Egypt.

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Not the Apocalypse We Wanted

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Not the Apocalypse We Wanted

In those uncertain times.

15/03/20
Last reading session with J. ‘Let’s have a final hug before the apocalypse’.

‘Cough etiquette’ tips from the Vice Chancellor. Solidarity messages from China to Italy: the epic tone of the prize-giving address.

Teenager sent home after selling shots of hand sanitiser at 50p a go. His mother, Jenny Tomkins, from Leeds, posted a picture of him arriving home after his entrepreneurial exploits at Dixons Unity Academy. In a post on Facebook, she said it was hard to discipline her son when his ‘dad called to say he was a legend’. The school denied it had excluded any pupils for selling hand sanitiser.

The sensation of pushing buzzers or tapping in codes with your knuckles.

Wash your hands like you’ve been chopping jalapenos and are now going to put in contacts. My mother-in-law is wearing a face mask, red woollen mittens, texting on phone in a ziploc bag: entering into the spirit of the thing. ‘Oh I suppose it’s an epidemic they’ve been having.’ The Father’s eyes were smiling behind his big round glasses.

It has spread across languages, cultures, even out to sea…The British tourist stuck on a cruise ship in quarantine: ‘The started putting food outside our door. It was nothing like the food from the buffet, the week before’.

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Memory and Forgetting

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Literatures of dementia, Alzheimer’s and lost memories.

“Memory is a primary and fundamental faculty, without which none other can work; the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties and embedded; or it is the thread on which the beads of man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary to moral action. Without it all life and thought were an unrelated succession. As gravity holds matter from flying off into space, so memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump, or flowing in waves.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Literature and Memory: Public lecture series on life-writing, autobiography, personal narrative (UCT Summer & Winter School: January & August 2020).
Artwork above by Robin Rhode.

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North by South

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Bergen Literary Festival, February 2020

I joined fellow South African writers Njabulo Ndebele, Jonny Steinberg and Koleka Putuma in Bergen. In the picture above they are discussing ‘The Meaning of Mandela’ and evoking the decades in which they came of age: a beautiful session. I talked to Jonny about his recent book.

“What to do? The amnesty machine seems not to have been designed to imbibe the unexpected. It was struggling enough just to process the routine.”
— One Day in Bethlehem (2019)

‘In short, there are problems’: Literary journalism in the postcolony.
Excerpt from Experiments with Truth: Narrative Non-fiction and the Coming of Democracy in South Africa.

In an epilogue to Little Liberia, his 2011 account of an African diaspora in New York, Jonny Steinberg records a telephone conversation with a man whose life he has just spent two years researching. The author has given Jacob Massaquoi a printout of the manuscript, along with a note proposing that 50% of the royalties be channelled to community projects. Four days later he receives a call:

‘I have read everything’, he said. ‘There are very serious problems with this book: problems that will hurt family back home, problems that will have re- percussions for me in Staten Island. And then there are still more problems I cannot discuss now. In short, there are problems.’

A Strange Luminescence

in ,
A Strange Luminescence

On John Akomfrah’s Four Nocturnes (2019).

Catalogue essay, Risk in Writing, A4 Arts Foundation. 1 July 2020.
Collaboration / diptych with Anna Hartford: Spreads Like Wildfire.

The decade began, just a week ago, in eerie red light. First pitch darkness at nine in the morning because of the smoke, then a red light on the horizon as the fire front approached. This was in eastern Australia, where navy ships began evacuating those being driven into the sea by the bushfires, but it was also everywhere. We saw it on our screens and it joined that category of uncanny aesthetic phenomena being generated week to week as the planet moves deeper into the Anthropocene: weather maps inventing new shades of purple as heat records are shattered; shards of ancient black ice calving from Arctic shelves, tints that might never before have touched human eyes. White glaciers in New Zealand went a uniform dirty yellow from Australian ash, as if a finger on a touch screen had flicked past ‘sepia’ and ‘vintage’ to opt for the filter ‘post-apocalyptic’, now and forever. ‘Post-apocalyptic is the new normal’ read one headline; every day something really not normal at all is the new normal, so with luck this copy-writing concept – so deadening as it slickly tries to absorb the radically unknown so quickly and knowingly into the already known – will itself soon be normalized and abandoned. Instead I kept watching a clip of man wearing ski goggles, on his boat with wife and children under the red sky, the fire wind lifting up his hair like static as he reached the limits of language, Mallacoota style:

‘Fuck. We, ah, decided to, ah, fuck off from the fucking houses, and thank fuck we did, cos the fire front’s come through. Everyone’s safe and sound. Got the girls and the dog’s up front. Got supplies but, I hope everyone’s fuckin just fuckin fuck the houses man. Get into the water. It’s fuckin…chaos. Fuck. I’ve never seen anything like it. Hope everyone’s safe man. Good luck.’

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